People who are constantly bombarded by the conflicting blandishments and politics of the day become pawns to be moved around the chessboard of life by one side or the other. But those who have a free mind cannot be moved or made to move by anyone other than themselves.
Those who stand on the bedrock of their own value answer to a higher authority that can deliver ties that bind us together more tightly than the forces that would tear us apart. Knowing our own value creates a holy place within each of us that stops us from competing with one another and allows us to begin working together to create a unified vision of a new kind of world.
We become co-authors of the narrative instead of characters in a story written by someone else. Even if you are the central character, the star of the show, if you are not doing the writing, the author could, at any given moment, introduce someone or something into the tale that would threaten your position. Therefore, you are not free; you are merely occupying a more or less well-decorated prison.
To be truly free, your sense of self must remain true. No matter what life throws your way, in whatever situation you might find yourself. your internal compass must continue to point due north so that it unerringly returns you to a place of peace and joy, with some important lessons learned along the way. When you stand firmly upon the foundation of your own values, there is nothing anyone could ever do to steal your peace.
Now imagine that every marginalized, under-represented, invisible, and silenced person on the planet knew they had this power. Imagine that we all had discovered the secret to liberating the mind despite external circumstances. Imagine that people were not prostrating themselves, crawling and competing for scraps in a starving world—and make no mistake, even the most affluent and privileged among us are also starving. If that were the case, we would have created a revolution, a gravitational force so powerful that it is capable of moving anything standing in its way—a population united through the power of love.
It is a revolution that must start with each and every one of us turning inward to examine ourselves. To do that, we must think about cause and effect. Just as an example, if you are a woman, how have you caused a man to dismiss you, demonize you, believe you to be inferior, to rape you, to not listen to you—assuming that is your felt reality. We can legislate against these behaviors, but they will always grow back more virulent than before. We need to eradicate them at the root, and the only root to which we have access is our own.
Once you create change in yourself, the whole world changes, Not only are you no longer a victim of circumstance; you are no longer the perpetrator of the cruelty that results from believing yourself to be a victim. You do not need to pre-bludgeon men because you mistakenly believe that they have any kind of power over you. In fact, to the contrary, based on your new understanding of yourself, you can afford to love them. You can see that they, too, are terrified and that their terror simply manifests itself differently from yours. You can love their fear, and, as a result, they will change, because they will no longer need to present themselves in a way that provides cover for the fear they don’t even know they have.
You have that power. We all have that power.
Adapted from the Author’s Preface to Erotic Justice