Conscious Choice: One Soul, One Vote

October 2004

One Soul, One Vote

Kerry vs. Bush: Our bestselling writer sorts out clever bumper stickers, detachment and whether or not spiritual people should vote.

By Deepak Chopra

"You really think your vote will make a difference?” My old friend Andrew showed up late for our rendezvous. He used to be Andy when I first met him back in 1972. That was the last year he cast a vote for President. I remember when he scraped off his bumper sticker that read “Don’t Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts."

He laughs when I mention it. “You’re dating yourself,” he says. That was the bumper sticker announcing that you voted for George McGovern in the 1972 election, the year Richard Nixon carried every state but Massachusetts.

Election 2004 Special - “To be spiritual is to realize many things, and one is that everyone is connected."Other things changed for Andrew around then. Because of Vietnam, the draft, Watergate, and the tenor of the times, he gave up on politics and began to move in a spiritual direction. His next bumper sticker said “Recovering Catholic,” followed by the current one, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness."

"I just saw a disgusting statistic on CNN,” he says. “Did you know that 86 percent of people who go to church once a week or more intend to vote for Bush?” He takes an angry chomp from his mock BLT sandwich. “I mean, that’s any church, not just the fundies."

"So at least you’re still emotional about the election,” I say.

"I’m a bundle of emotions. Detachment is one of my big lessons."

And so we jump into these gray, vague questions about whether spiritual people should vote: Does any vote really make a difference? Aren’t you already doing enough for the world without giving in to this pointless ritual? Does voting make you a good citizen but a bad saint?

Andrew wouldn’t like that word. He makes a severe distinction between spirituality and religion. He doesn’t see himself as a practicing Catholic anymore, therefore the dictum of “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is no longer part of his vocabulary. He rises at dawn for his long daily meditation, eats his organic vegetables, takes his massages and reads–quite seriously, though I am poking some fun at him–in the scriptures of every faith, and beyond.

Still A Believer

candleAll of which makes him curious that I would still believe that I could actually influence the outcome of the election, trudging into the voting booth after all these years.

Here’s the gist of what I told him one day last month: To be spiritual is to realize many things, and one is that everyone is connected. When you act, you affect every moment of your life. You affect every moment in everyone else’s life.

Because we are all connected, you can’t turn your back on it. In fact, being connected creates a new kind of power for the individual. It may seem that a simple social act, such as casting a vote, is a tiny gesture. In an atmosphere of intolerance it can seem like a fruitless gesture as well.

But it isn’t. A single vote contains a bit of mystery.

What do people carry in with them when they close the curtain of the voting booth? They carry their political convictions, whether they align with the right or the left. They carry their sense of civic duty. They carry their emotions. But deeper down, aren’t they also carrying their whole lives?

If living in the moment means anything, it means that each moment of existence is a point that contains everything. In a mysterious way, to act is to express the universe, and like the still point of the revolving world, each act is both in time and outside it.

Spiritual people aspire to be in both places–time and the timeless–and not just one. In India this is sometimes expressed as “the lamp at the door,” a phrase which means that your soul is poised, as if on a threshold, between the everyday events that occur in time and the background of the unchanging, infinite absolute.

The reason this is important is that if you can live from the level of your soul, you are doing something very special. You are tinging each day with a bit of the timeless. It doesn’t really matter what actions you take. The important thing is how much consciousness you add to the whole of human existence, for that is how eternity expresses itself, by the depth of consciousness that can be brought into time from somewhere else–the timeless realm of pure consciousness.

A great soul like Buddha or Jesus was not great at just those shining moments that history would recall. It was the state of their souls that made them great. They weren’t just a lamp at the door, they were beacons at sea. You and I are also in a certain state of the soul, and yet we do not know what that state is. We feel smaller than Buddha or Jesus, yet that is an opinion formed by our egos.

Lighting Up Consciousness

Spiritually, the light being expressed through a human being is equal. Why? Because “light” is a metaphor for the power of consciousness.

Everyone’s consciousness has the power to manifest reality. It doesn’t matter if history will remember you as a great soul. You are at this moment expressing the entire universe through your consciousness. The divine plan may not need you to reach its ultimate fulfillment–none of us knows what that fulfillment may be. Yet the divine plan needs you to fulfill your part; in that respect you are unique.

When Jesus taught his followers to render unto God what is God’s, and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, the lesson comes across as rather grudging. At least that’s how many spiritual people see it. They interpret the lesson like this: You might as well vote and pay taxes because of all the trouble you’ll get into if you don’t. Caesar will come after you, and anyway, it’s good to keep your head down and not let all those law-abiding Joe Lunch-buckets know that you aren’t like them anymore.

This attitude combines snobbery and fear in an unwholesome dish. I don’t think Jesus was doing that. He was perfectly describing, in his own words, the concept of the lamp at the door. He gave the same lesson when he advised his followers to be in this world but not of it. It’s a tricky, rather delicate attitude to take.

Becoming Into Our Own

But it’s also the healthiest attitude. God didn’t create a world so that people could disdain it. Human beings don’t have political ideals, strong emotions and deep convictions in order to throw them away. We are in this world so that we can watch the mystery of its becoming, and in that spectacle we watch the mystery of our own becoming.

So what is the world becoming and what are we becoming? It’s an open question. I’d like to think that we are becoming a new humanity, but I may be wrong. My vote for President won’t hasten that new humanity, nor will it retard it. What my vote will do is put consciousness into action.

I’m not saying that’s a virtue. I am not hoisting myself above those well-intentioned spiritual people who pursue their private disciplines and choose to ignore most of Caesar’s realm.

But I am connected to everything in the world. This is the realization that takes me to the polls. I step into the booth not as a dutiful citizen, a political animal or a bundle of emotions–even though I am all of those things. I am also a strand in the web of consciousness, and when my little strand trembles, the universe notices.

Voting is an act of consciousness, and as such I think the votes of spiritual people are actually more powerful than the votes of unconscious people. Your hand on the voting lever is affecting the world as surely as the lifting of Buddha’s hand in a mudra of peace or the teaching of Jesus that announced love as a force in the cosmos.

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