(Q) What role, if any, does being a member of a minority group play in the prospect of one having an awakening experience?
(A) As I have stated many times before, and often by paraphrasing Eckhart Tolle, an authentic awakening experience is an act of grace. It cannot be planned for. It often takes one by surprise. One cannot “work” on becoming awake. Now, with that being said, I still am going to answer your question and perhaps even at length. This is because I believe there are some clear roadblocks that can make it far less likely that one may have such an experience and one of the major roadblocks exists primarily for people who have membership in one or more major minority groups.
First let me give a very simple definition of a so called awakening experience. Here it is. It will not make sense to some. That is OK. It however, is the best I can do at the moment--the mind stops, either temporarily or permanently and we cease identifying with all forms, including thought forms and also simultaneously we become what I call inseparable interconnectedness.
Creating an identity out of anything is one of the most significant roadblocks there is to authentic awakening. This is so regardless of one’s membership in a minority group or not. By and large people who belong to dominant classes, cultures and groups face pretty much the same obstacles here as those who do not. The big difference is this: If one belongs to a minority group it is far more likely that we have created some sort of a solid identity out of that minority status. I AM gay. I AM black. I AM a woman. I AM a Christian. I AM the richest person in the world. And creating an identity out of anything is an act of ego, nothing more, nothing less. So creating an identity out of something becomes a very significant and additional block to awakening that members of minorities face more than members of dominant groups. With this you may be thinking “but members of dominant groups can also make an identity out of that, can’t they?" Yes they can. The difference is that most members of any dominant group have not had their membership in that group supremely reinforced in the same ways that members of minority groups have had our membership in minority groups reinforced.
For a number of years I taught cultural diversity classes. One of the exercises I always had my classes do was one in which people had to identify a specific group they belonged to and then present a list of distinct traits and attributes, positive or negative, of that group. Without fail white, male, Christian, heterosexual individuals always had the most difficulty doing this exercise. White people in general always had extreme difficulty with it. Often white peope would come up with groups that were notexclusive to the white experience such as being an “American” or being a “mother” or being a “father." However, they would try to present those as somehow being distinct to the white experience. It often had the feel of desperation in classes filled with ethnic minorities, gay and lesbian people who readily spoke volumes about those experiences and how they were indeed distinct to membership in those specific groups. So for all the presumed power that white, heterosexual men have in the world, they certainly were often completely unable to connect that power to those elements of their experienced personhood that were responsible for their power. Fascinating stuff. Conversely, ethnic minorities and LGBT people were instantly able to identify how their membership in their respective groups were a source ofdisempowerment and they were extremely competent in connecting all the dots as well.
This does not mean that white privilege and male dominance do not exist in the world. They certainly do. What I am saying is that for the average white, male or heterosexual person, this power does not exist as an extremely conscious thing. Indeed, people who work in fields were the study, examination and understanding of white privilege, male dominance and heterosexism will tell you this right away. Just like people who work in these areas I tell you, the average person who belongs to a major dominant group on the planet does not spend much of his or her waking moments being in a state of conscious awareness of his or her power as a member of such a dominant class even though the power is absolutely endemic to membership in that dominant group. This, in fact, is one of the core elements that defines concepts such as white privilege and heterosexism. One's power that is derived from membership in certain groups is so taken for granted one doesn't even have to think about it or develop any degree of consciousness around it. Members of major minority groups however, spend almost every waking moment of our lives being incredibly conscious of our lack of power or in some relatively few cases, the presence of power because of or much more likely, in spite of membership in the minority group or groups we have membership in. And it is exactly this difference where the role of the ego becomes extremely important.
Eckhart Tolle, in his groundbreaking work “A New Earth,” definitively and I believe successfully challenged the myth that a strong ego is only to be found in those who are coming from some place of demonstrative ego inflation. He states very convincingly that someone who has, for example, a “poor me” complex is also coming from a place of extraordinarily inflated ego. This person essentially believes they are so important the entire world is conspiring to undermine them. And so what looks like very low ego strength is in fact just another expression of the same thing that exists in people who have what is referred to as an inflated ego. And then they often go on to create an identity out of the belief that everything or many things are a conspiracy against them. That can be an extremely powerful identity for someone the thought they they are so special the entire world is conspiring against them. This however is what many ethnic people's and LGBT people strongly believe and they will think you are completely crazy if you try to challenge those beliefs.
Now, I want to list four minority groups. A few of them might surprise you. I’m not going to speak very specifically about them. I mostly am simply picking these out of the very large number of minority groups in the world as examples. Here we go. There are ethnic minorities in general. There are sexual minorities. Here I am specifically speaking of members of the LGBT communities. In other words I am speaking of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. There are the extremely rich. And finally there are the extremely powerful people in the world.
Let me restate my thesis here. My thesis is that being a member of one or more minority groups presents a unique challenge in the area of prospective awakening. And that challenge is because being a member of one or more minority groups can easily become an identity for those who claim membership in such groups.
I also want to be clear here that I am not just speaking of a mere acceptance of one’s membership in such groups nor a healthy level of self-esteem about it. I also may not be speaking of some low level or low-grade type of pride in being Italian, for example. Although I’m not sure about that. It could be that even the lowest levels of what we think of as ethnic or other group pride have already been strongly infected by the ego. However, I am speaking of people who have really "taken on the mantle" as it were of membership in one of those groups.
You may wonder why I have included the very powerful and the very wealthy. You may also wonder why I have separated the two. I have separated the two because one may be very powerful, such as The Dalai Lama, and have very little personal wealth. Or one may be very wealthy and have relatively little power in the way I am meaning here. Such examples would be the heirs to vast fortunes such as some of the children of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, who are billionaires but who seemingly exert no real perceivable nor unusual power in the world aside from that which comes from having a lot of money, which can be tricky to separate I realize. Finally, I have included both categories in order to raise consciousness around the extreme diversity that exists in what are the earth’s "minority groups."
Most of us, I believe, can think of someone in our life who has created a solid identity for him or herself because of membership in one or more of those four groups. I believe it is exponentially more difficult to be a member of multiple and significant minority groups and to also have any kind of authentic awakening experience. That is part of the reason why people like Oprah Winfrey, The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are such inspirations to me and so many other people in the world. They each belong to multiple minority groups that each contain very strong pulls toward creating an identity out of that membership and/or to becoming relatively unconscious as a result. Oprah, I believe, has arguably had to overcome the most to achieve what to me is an obvious level of awakened nature. It is extremely difficult to achieve any level of awakened nature, I believe, while simultaneously maintaining membership in several of the groups she maintains membership in. She is a woman. She is a black. She is a black woman. She grew up in an era where the best job a back woman could hope to obtain was being a maid to a wealthy white family. She is powerful. She is wealthy. She is more or less a self made person. The mere fact that she is not an absolutely certifiably deranged fire breathing dragon woman from hell, crushing every single person she encounters under her 7-inch Louboutins is enough to be very impressed with. The fact that she has obvious compassion and caring towards her fellow humans is inspiring, to say the least.
The one category of the four I’ve selected that I have very strong personal experience with is LGBT people. I know a large number of LGBT people of almost every age group, ethnicity, socio-economic status and spiritual or religious persuasion. Many clearly seem to have created an unhealthy level of identity out of their membership in this minority group. It is, I believe, the single strongest impediment to an awakened experience for LGBT folks that I know of. It can be a major trap. Such a potential trap strongly awaits anyone who belongs to one or more minority groups.
Still, there is a silver lining, as there usually is with most things in life. And that silver lining is that the stronger we identify with any expression of ego, the more likely we are to eventually end up in some form of extreme mental-emotional pain. And those who are in extreme mental-emotional pain often find themselves at a crossroads where the choices are to either wake up or die. And through another expression of grace in the universe, most people don’t die when things get to that point.
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