Children of America's Ghettos

We are living in an era of great anger. Many of us are searching for answers on the economy, war, and the endless political machinations dominating the news. And even with our daily meditations and prayers, we find it difficult to escape the gloom and doom. Yet many of us have, even under our current circumstance, a higher quality of  life than the millions of children in America's ghettos.

As the enlightenment-seekers, we are always working to find clarity. We desire to live beyond the darkness to see what's happening in our lives. And, unfortunately, sometimes by focusing too  much on our own development, we forget about the suffering of others. Perhaps we don't totally forget about others' suffering, we don't accept it as part of our own enlightenment efforts.

Many of us believe enlightenment is a personal commitment each of us have to make. We don't believe it can be forced on others. They must accept enlightenment willingly. And those who choose not pursue enlightenment will continue to live with suffering. It's their choice. And we want to leave it at that.

Whenever we take the time to think about the reasons we began to work on ourselves, we vividly remember the intense suffering we were undergoing at the time. We also know that by committing to enlightenment, we are also committing to sharing ourselves with others. If not, it seems rather selfish to become enlightened while the rest of the world is mired in lifelong suffering.

There cannot be pure enlightenment in our lives until we address our relationship with the children of America's ghettos. They remind us of where we are in our personal growth. We are forced to ask ourselves whether we are really enlightened or playing games of spiritual superiority.

Regardless to the pious words, spiritual posturing, and claims of compassion, we still feel an emptiness in our spirit because of the suffering of others.

 Similarly, this emptiness in our lives cannot be fulfilled with spiritual isolation of prayer and meditation. We must go beyond our own disciplines and actively express compassion to those who need it just as much as we do. We cannot become complete without sharing everything we have with the world. And our sharing must be very different from what traditional sharing has meant to them. 

The children of America's ghettos are born into great suffering. Most of them are destined to experience such intense suffering that most of us cannot even imagine the magnitude of it. Their suffering is not only tied to lack, limitation, and struggle, but suffering of the soul. And most of all, they suffer from a lack of genuine love and compassion from those who are responsible for giving it to them.

Nevertheless, regardless to the number of times we talk about accepting responsibility for our actions, we are speaking from our own perspective about suffering. It's our personal message. It's a perspective unavailable to those seemingly destined for jail, prison, unemployment, drug, alcohol, and food addictions, illiteracy, and every other societal degradation known to us.

There's no way for us to reconcile our enlightenment work without including others, even those who defy our efforts. And although many of us are unaware of what it's like to have a truly enlightened awareness, we believe it must be a state of consciousness that understands suffering. And to understand suffering, we also understand the victimization killing the dreams of millions suffering in America's ghettos.

America's ghettos extend beyond the physical parameters. The ghetto beliefs and culture thrives in everyone in this country. We have been taught to perceive it as the hellhole we all want to get away from. And as we do, we lose the ability to understand why we continue to have suffering in our lives, even when we achieve so many things -- education, money, status, and so forth.

Those of us who believe we are beyond the clutches of the ghetto culture, perceive others' suffering from our own victim perspective. We magnify their suffering by questioning the goodness of humans and the universal love of the Creator. We want answers to problems on suffering that are unavailable to us because we are too victimized by our own suffering.

Nevertheless, we still want to do something about the endless suffering of others in the world.Some of us pray for them. While others give money. And others develop programs to assist them with jobs, education, housing, addictions, and so forth.

We earnestly believe we are helping them to overcome the intense suffering caused by years of victimization. The more we give, the more they suffer. We cannot seem to reach our goal of less suffering. While we constantly search for more things to make the people more like us, we overlook that what's missing from our giving is love and compassion. We're devaluing  love and compassion by valuing money, education, jobs,and so forth.

After much work, as we go deeper into ourselves, we will gain the necessary clarity to discern the collective nature of suffering. This clarity will enlighten us to understand that we are all responsible for creating the conditions, the belief system, that's responsible for creating and maintaining America's ghettos.

Some of us seeking enlightenment believe our lives reflect a greater awareness of peace, love and compassion than those on drugs, alcohol, in prison, or mired in poverty, anger and self-hatred. And while we are products of the ghetto belief system, even those who deny it because of their current status, we find it difficult now to believe our suffering originated from our victimization.

Meanwhile, regardless to our denials, we have our own personal victim beliefs that are responsible for our suffering. They have everything to do with how we work on ourselves. We have a special illness -- victimization of the mind -- that requires special medicine. This medicine is only available in an enlightened consciousness.

It will take most of us the rest of our lives to cure ourselves of victimization.