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Spiritual leaders have a lot to say about how you should live your life. Ever want to be a fly on the wall and see how they live their own lives?
The new Spiritual Cinema Circle featured documentary Spiritual Liberation (see a preview below) gives you an intimate look into a typical day in the life of one of the most inspiring spiritual leaders of our time, Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder and spiritual director of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles and author of Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul's Potential. I recently got a chance to talk to Beckwith about how the film reveals his day-to-day, how he sees a spiritual leader's role in our society, and how our spirituality interconnects with our current political and economic crises.
Q. How does the film let us see into your everyday life?
A. In one part there's a dinner in my home and some of my friends and family share their experience of that morning's talk I gave at Agape. It flows back and forth from sanctuary to dining room table talk. It was a very sweet and very powerful thing for me to hear how my friends are integrating my teachings into their daily life, at the kitchen sink level, because that's what matters — that there's a practical practice that can affect their lives.
My life now is about discovering and expressing the vitalizing, loving presence we all are. People want to know about their purpose, why are they here on the planet. It's the question that won't go away because the answer reveals that we are here to wake up, to discover our true nature.
What role should spiritual leaders play in solving our political issues?
Visionary, progressive spiritual leaders have always been among us throughout history. They have spoken and continue to speak to more than traditionally political issues. They were abolitionists. They spoke for women's rights. They spoke for the African Americans and other minorities. They are now speaking for gay marriage, reforming our prison systems, and stopping torture.
A genuine spiritual leader holds and conveys a vision of the highest possibilities for humankind. He or she keeps high ideals at the forefront so people remain encouraged that we live in a friendly universe — one that is constantly conspiring on our behalf, cherishes humanity, and is constantly providing inspiration that speaks to our next stage of evolution.
There's a spiritual mandate for us to discover our gifts, talents and capacities, to uncover them, to cultivate them, and to express them. That's why we're here. At this time in our evolution, we have to go beyond the mere survival instinct and really begin to ask the deeper questions as to what's trying to emerge in our individual lives. The next step is to open ourselves, to become receptive to the teachings and practices of a spiritual path that can not only meet us at our current level of consciousness, but support us in our evolutionary expansion.
The role of a spiritual teacher is to consistently point to the limitless possibilities available to us. If it rattles some people's chains, so be it.
Will our current economic and social crises lead humankind to evolve, or to dissolve?
As I listen to people during my speaking engagements, I hear a new tonality of genuine interest in living life from the inside out rather than superficially. It absolutely feels as though the universe is projecting one massive evolutionary trigger for humanity to take a collective evolutionary leap. As we watch the old systems breaking apart, as we admit they are obsolete, we make space for the new to enter. Paradoxically, these seeming opposites are happening simultaneously.
When we look at the decay of our stock market and the global economy, what appears to be dissolving is greed, the rampant materialism, the consumerism, that which drove economic systems up to this point. Humanity is beginning to ask some different questions about values and principles. We will no longer look to the material forms of success, such as how the stock market is doing. It won't be our barometer for success anymore.
Here's a preview of Spiritual Liberation (trailer will play after Stephen Simon's short intro and the Outsourced trailer). Receive all four films previewed in this clip free when you sign up by Sept. 10, 2009, for a free trial membership in Spiritual Cinema Circle, the only DVD home delivery service dedicated to films about love, compassion and inspiration.
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Great interview and very inspirational information. The times we are living in today are tough but they are just that because they are necessary for us to wake up from our constant "dream state" in which we work, go home, sleep, wake up the next morning, and do it all over again... never stopping to think of what we are here to do, to meditate, to enhance our consciousness or anything else.
I lived that life while I was an attorney for the past six years. I am now the editor of www.mymeditationgarden.com. A website I created specifically for those who are caught in the rat race, to show them there is another way to live life and that the easiest way to stop and realize that is through meditation and following free guided meditation videos which I provide on the site. I hope people find the meditations helpful and I hope to hear from them comments and feedback as to their experiences and how meditating has affected them in their daily lives.
Edited by: Sonia Gallagher on Sep 8, 2009 12:05:31 PMSep 8, 2009 12:03:17 PM