What is Democracy?
The United States of America was founded upon the principle of religious freedom and the separation of religion from the governing body of this country. However, spirituality is not religion, and we are moving toward a time when spirituality, the recognition of the divine within all, shall infuse all aspects of governance and of political life.
One of the fundamental precepts of our democracy is religious freedom, established in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In order to ensure this freedom, there is a mandated separation between religion and government, so that no one religion comes to dominate others, and so that equal access to government and its powers can be held by all.
What applies to religion, however, with its exclusivity, does not apply to spirituality, which is a universal quality of being, unrelated to what religion one belongs to. Being universal, it is not exclusive. It holds that all are of divine origin, and that the expression of this relationship can take place in many ways. Because of this, we can speak of the joining of spirituality with political life, without jeopardizing the principle of religious freedom, or considering that some are less spiritual than others.
We can also speak of the union of the spiritual and the political, a union that can take place when the governing body of a nation and those who are governed hold at the center of their decision-making, the divine life that exists within all, and when, collectively and individually, they can access and align with the purposes of this divine life.
This is not democracy as we have known it. It is democracy based on sacred governance, in which the governing body and its leadership, in the presence of divine guidance, assumes the responsibility of serving the souls of all, not just a few, and in which those who are governed accept the responsibility of representing their needs to the governing body, and of accepting membership within the governing body, according to their readiness to do so.
This is a new kind of democracy, rooted in the sacred, emerging at a time when all come to realize that divine reality is real, and is the underpinning of physical reality.