Dear Hillary

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Dear Hillary:

Because I thought that you would probably be nominated for President, I started writing to you to encourage you to get back in touch with the fiery heart that I first saw in your 1993 effort to get justice for the people in the area of health care. The fact that your effort called out an immediate and overwhelming assault from various sectors of the cabal of the super profitable health industry which would never run out of customers was indicative of how significant was yours and Bills opening salvo. It was also, at the very beginning of you time in the Office, a test of your courage and ability to endure in the face of momentary defeat and seemingly overwhelming odds.

The details of the years following that massive defeat reveal how you and Bill gradually slipped out of the space where were live the heroes who make Change Happen, a space of few if any rewards and frequently lots of pain,  and into the pit of "liberal pragmatic halfwayness" which is the last refuge of the too chastised or too wounded or too frightened to take the necessary risks for evolution. However it is a space that satisfies the ego and pays nicely for making changes that appear to do something while hiding the fact that they actually improve the positions of the retrogressive cabals.

Once you indicated that you were willing to compromise, you will recall, the bludgeoning only increased, as did your willingness to compromise. The heart was gone and was replaced by what we have been seeing in your actions of late. Self concern, Self preservation, personal advancement, and egoism replace the fire of the heart and take over the equipment.

This development is not that unusual and it is often a continuation of the testing process. It is a kind of disease that over takes a lot of us in the purity of our fiery youth. Actually it is a kind of karmic weeding out process that eliminates from the Great Struggle those who cannot presently endure.

I stopped writing to you because there was no evidence that you were getting or if getting, that you were not hearing. In the Democratic debates your self-concerned incrementalism, your liberal pragmatic halfwayness was front and center.

However toward the end of the recent debate you made the following statement regarding your feelings and concerns for the victims. "I mean, look, I care deeply about this because just like you I have met so many people who had their life savings wiped out, who lost their homes, who are barely back with their heads above water." And then in your closing remarks you made this statement, "So I have been moved by my heart ever since I was a young woman about the age of a lot of Senator Sanders’ supporters worrying what I can do to make a difference for my country, and I will bring that heart with me, but I will also tell you we’ve got to get our heads together to come up with the best answers to solve the problems so that people can have real differences in their lives that will make them better for now and into the future."

I thought that this was possibly an opening, that perhaps your advisers had been talking to you about the missing heart.  Hopefully, you will connect with your heart. However, one needs to be careful not to confuse one's emotions with the heart.

The heart is compassionate. It is not emotional. It does not feel personally bad or sad for people's suffering. It knows suffering on a very deep level. Perhaps you could ask the Dali Lama or the Pope, or for that matter, The President about Compassion.

The heart never sheds a tear, for tears distort the vision; however, the indefatigable power of the heart is not  force. It is love. The true heart understands. It intuitively knows the cause and the cure for what is generating the suffering, and it wholeheartedly and totally energizes actions that will eliminate those causes by impressing the mind with the directions and steps of what to do.

The heart is the Knower of the Way. The mind is the doer.

When the mind is not being directed by the heart or by Wisdom, but by the self-centered personality, its actions will always tend toward self or ego fulfillment. If the ego desires to  be seen as "liberal" then the actions will tend toward the kind of halfway measures which are seen as pragmatic because they represent little chance of not succeeding. They will not be "wrong" and cause a "loss of face" to the ego.

So, by all means Hillary, bring your heart, and let it be your true heart, that fiery heart of the young woman who put everything on the table. But be certain that the heart is telling the head what to do and not the other way around. This way you make a great President rather than another halfway one.

Lots of love

-tom