I have been observing the DACA Dreamers negotiations through my peripheral vision. I know people feel very passionately about it. My feeling is that those who oppose it are mostly insecure about their identity, value, and capacity to compete with a complex and motivated population. Politics has never really engaged me, because I always feel that there is a deeper level to reality that political passions tend to camouflage. Politics is about leveraging power for influence, and the pendulum’s swinging back and forth from left to right is the very nature of American Democracy. A large part of the population will always hold conservative views and a large part will always be progressive, and the percentages of those who make the difference in elections will always vacillate.
But the notion of who belongs “here”, is a more fascinating concept to engage. It asks the question “Where is here?” The concept of the United States is a powerful one. But anybody who has traveled within it knows that as you move around, the concept of it changes from place to place, and even from person to person. It’s not a stable concept unless we’re with people who share our opinions. For every person who passionately felt Barack Obama was an appropriate representative of the American population, there was another person who hated him, and vice versa with Donald Trump.
So, what can we trust as an identity, whether it is national or personal? I propose we are all Dreamers. Their issues are symbolically our issues. We have all been seemingly brought “here” by our parents, and for some of us, their nationality. or their identity makes us feel secure. Ultimately, it shouldn’t. Our origins extend far beyond our parents and the histories of our families and culture. No matter how successful or unsuccessful our families are or are not, our identity derived from them is incomplete, and our incomplete identities derived by our loss of contact with our origins is the source of most suffering and anxiety. Each person brings suffering into this lifetime in the form of distortion in their understanding of their origins(me included). Our misunderstanding is shown to us in high relief by our historical and biographical circumstances. For each of us, our historical biography is an incomplete map of our ourselves. To experience our wholeness, we must travel onwards, past our history to our primordial origins and see how that gap exercises influence in our understanding of ourselves. Shoring up this relationship is not the only engine in our lives, we are also compelled to share our gifts, and to love, but the need to bridge this gap can be a very stern and relentless teacher.
Astrology has taught me that there is an identifiable intelligent intention behind the circumstances of every single person’s life, and no one is strictly the result of their historical circumstances. One’s relationship with their parents, family, and and place in the culture is an identifiable fact at the moment of their birth. We are born with intentional dynamics in our consciousness that will shape our experience as a three dimensional feedback loop. Every experience will follow that intention. Nobody exists outside this influence. Nobody you ever will meet will not share these same origins or exist outside these influences. Every single person exists under the transformative pressure of these influences at every moment of their life. They are always in play, and always identifiable, no matter whether our culture of rational materialism hides them or not.
Like the dreamers, we are all searching for safety in our location, our peers, and our circumstances. But for each of us, the only real safety is in reconnecting with of our origins. By getting beyond our opinions or self concepts, we can connect with the intelligent consciousness that knows us better than anyone, which amazingly turns out to be a part of us. This is where we find our belonging. This is where we find our safety. This is where we find our compassion for ourselves and others. This where we recognize we are all Dreamers.