Strange Religious Experiences

[steve_bank]

When you start walking do you start with your right or left foot?

 

[lpetrich]

I posted the Robert Goddard one here because of how it seems like some religious/spiritual/mystical vision, even though RG never gave it any religious/spiritual/mystical interpretation.

I'll now turn to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a very remarkable political celebrity. She did well in high school and college, but not so well afterward, and she ended up a waitress and a bartender. In early 2016, she campaigned for Bernie Sanders, but Hillary Clinton won in the primaries. Some of BS's campaigners created a Political Action Committee that they called Brand New Congress, for electing like-minded people to that body. They requested endorsements of possible candidates, and they got some 11,000, including AOC herself.

Then Trump got elected.

Then as she was reading an online magazine, she saw an ad for the protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline just north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. She noticed someone who had worked with her on an educational project and she felt like she had to contact her old friend. She did, and she found out what the Standing Rock protesters wanted. More women. She didn't like that idea, and they settled on bringing supplies. A friend borrowed an old Subaru station wagon with a broken cigarette lighter and broken heating. They also borrowed a GoPro video camera from another friend, and they set up a GoFundMe account to collect donations to purchase supplies.

So AOC, that first friend, and yet another friend were soon on their way. AOC felt called to there, attracted to there like iron to a magnet. They stopped in towns on the way and met activists there, and they got past some militaristic armed guards to reach the protest camp. The protesters called themselves "water protectors" and they engaged in some Native American religious rites, like maintaining sacred fires. “Prayer is action”: Contemplative practice and social justice in Standing Rock, ND - Mind & Life Institute Blog

On my first morning at Standing Rock, after a cold sleep punctuated by the sound of a helicopter in the night sky, a camp leader addressed newly arrived people in these words: “I see many of you who are new to camp walking around looking for action. Let me remind you that prayer is action.” Prayer is at the heart of Oceti Sakowin and other camps where members of the Great Sioux Nation and their indigenous and non-indigenous supporters are gathered. Ceremonies exuding gratitude and hope are often held next to the camp’s sacred fires and the Cannonball River, quietly flowing under a thin layer of ice. Elders ask every supporter at the camp to be in constant prayer.

The emphasis on mindful presence, prayer and ceremony struck me as being the roots of the movement when I visited Oceti Sakowin in November 2016. Contemplative practices in the form of individual and collective prayer, chanting and mindfulness are ubiquitous at the camp in a way that I had not experienced in other social contexts with an explicit purpose that went beyond joint practice.

I read somewhere that a lot of the prayers were invocations and dedications.

AOC had long been an admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil-rights movement, and nonviolent activism more generally, and that is what she found at Standing Rock. She found ordinary people putting their lives on the line for what was important to them. She describes her experience there as very spiritual and transformative. She felt ready to do something, but she wasn't sure what. As she was departing from it, she got a message from Brand New Congress, inviting her to run for office. She felt like she was being told to run. Which she did.

 

[steve_bank]

Condoleezza Rice former SOS for George Bush is by all accounts brilliant. From her interviews I agree. Teaches at Standord.

In one interview she said she does not plan her life, she relies on god. Education and intelligence has apparently nothing to do with it.

 

[lpetrich]

Condoleezza Rice former SOS for George Bush is by all accounts brilliant. From her interviews I agree. Teaches at Standord.

In one interview she said she does not plan her life, she relies on god. Education and intelligence has apparently nothing to do with it.

I agree that that's very daffy. She could not have gotten anywhere in her career without making lots of plans on the way. It would have made more sense if she said "I plan what's reasonable for me to plan, and I let God do the rest."

AOC said something similar in her conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates earlier this year on MLK Day, and the context is rather interesting. She doesn't have long-range career plans for her political career, and she says that she's less having plans than waiting to find out what is the plan for her. It could be living in a cabin in the wilderness. Then, "I don't know what shape or or what form my life will take, and I don't impose a plan on it, because I have given it - myself, personally - in my context of things - I have given it to a higher power."

Was she saying that that's how her mind works?