Selma Samadhi

Yesterday I did a sunrise yoga series, drove to Western Mass, hiked up Mt. Tom, watched the movie Selma about Dr. King, went out to Vietnamese restaurant for some curried vegetables and white tea, got some raw organic fruit and nuts, and discovered a handful of wonderful contacts in the area through Many Hands, a magazine for holistic health. 

While watching Selma, I experienced a powerful altered state of consciousness called samadhi, defined in the Yoga Sutras as a state where there no distinction between act of meditation and the object of meditation. My object of complete absorption and meditation was peace. I was peace.  I was a powerful vibration of peace thought-form. It's a state that transcends space and time, as if my energy was literally part of the historical event while also knowing that we are living in the 1,000 years of peace era now! I talk about and encourage this in the Peace Every Day meditation in Unity (p.597-604). I suggest achieving this through meditation, but even dancing, walking, or watching a movie such as Selma can invoke this thought-emotion-feeling-consciousness that connects us to the global consciousness.

I entered into peace samadhi when the Boston Pastor was reflecting on the power of Dr. King's actions on the bridge at Selma. He was talking about how Dr. King decided to turn the crowd around and was himself in a state of samadhi, channeling the Divine, and what psychologists call being "in the flow. (Unity, p.172). 

"King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up."

Veganism: The Continuation of the Civil Rights Movement

Selma is about one of the greatest demonstrations of protest and it lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The vegan movement now is about the expansion and continuation of the worldwide Civil Rights movement for equality before the law for non-human animals. 

Dr. King's Wife, Coretta Scott King and son Dexter promoted veganism because it was interconnected with nonviolence. The King family was inspired by Dick Gregory's Callus on My Soul:

"Under the leadership of Dr. King, I became totally committed to nonviolence, and I was convinced that nonviolence meant opposition to killing in any form.  I felt the commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ applied to human beings not only in their dealings with each other—war, lynching, assassination, murder and the like—but in their practice of killing animals for food and sport.  Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and brutal taking of life.”

Other civil rights movement leaders also advocate for this expansion of rights and nonviolence:

“If I’m eating food I know was a creature in a cage, it brings up memories of segregation and the stories from my ancestors, of being in captivity and denied their personalities, their true beings. Animals were not made for us, or our use. They have their own use, which is just being who they are.” -Alice Walker, see also: Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1997).

The other important point that the movie Selma makes is that Malcom X's violent radicalism was the altnerative to Dr. King's nonviolent protest. Malcom gave Martin room to make revolutionary demands. Many experts think that without Malcom, there'd be no Martin.

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom. -Malcom X, see, Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.