Pain is love

So many folks rail against corporatism while quietly profiting from it…(Ja Rule voice) “Oh I’m, feelin’ like ya livin’ a…double life.”

Evolving the quality of our consciousness is our only real obligation, so I do all kinds of things to work on myself.

And yet, I frequently backslide. From neglecting my fitness, to coasting in my career, to just acting like a jerk, I mess up all the time.

One way I hold myself accountable is by keeping company with people who speak the truth in love to me. One such community was a men’s group I joined, where I learned loads about myself and about being human. Through readings, meetings, and spiritual exercises, we opened up to one another in circle as brothers and came out the other side with deeper self-awareness and a greater sense of purpose.

In one meeting, our co-lead said something that changed my life: Personal evolution is always forged in the crucible of pain. Pain, he explained, is a gift from the Universe that presents opportunities for spiritual expansion. Just as a weightlifter stresses muscles to make them stronger, life puts us through pain to expand our consciousness.

The Universe has gifted me plenty of pain.

One of the most painful experiences of my life was the year I spent working in a large corporate law firm—“biglaw,” as they call it. There were many reasons why biglaw was spirit-injurious, and I barely lasted a year before quitting to start my own civil rights practice, suing the same kinds of corporations I used to represent.

What flummoxed me most about biglaw wasn’t the long hours or the work—although I didn’t love those, either—it was the hypocrisy. Most of my colleagues were bright, progressive-minded people who railed against the evils of corporatism and donated to Bernie Sanders, yet spent their days getting paid big bank to defend the very corporations they condemned. They lived a kind of double life, like that TV show Severance, where people’s work and personal identities are completely split. The schizophrenia required to survive in that world was not a vibrational match for me, so I left and never looked back.

But one day, it hit me that I wasn’t all that different from them. I wasn’t just working for corporations that put profit over people and the planet—I owned them.

Our society keeps us shackled in spiritual chains by exploiting two powerful emotions: fear and greed. Most of us fear getting old and running out of money, so our leaders tied our financial security to the stock market.

It’s no accident that most of our employers automatically enroll us in 401(k)s that funnel our wages into mutual funds—tiny ownership slices of many corporations, often the 500 or 1,000 largest in the U.S. So even if you’ve never set foot in a corporate boardroom, you likely own pieces of oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and pharmaceutical giants.

We are the corporation. And that’s the problem.

Corporatism is the baddest bad the Earth has ever known. It demands infinite growth on a planet with finite resources, with an insatiable appetite for human souls and nature. Its relentless pursuit of profit has inflicted deep wounds on both our planet and our collective consciousness that deepen every day.

If you have a retirement account, you probably own and profit from corporations that put profit over people and the planet. Every dollar you invest advances corporate values, which are only about profit maximization and self-interest, and nothing about human values like love, compassion, empathy, or loyalty. Just money and margins. You are funding the machine that devours the Earth, concentrates wealth, and enslaves the human spirit.

Which makes you part of the problem. That’s not judgment—it’s math. 

Corporations get away with destroying people and the planet because our system opts us in to owning them. That’s why so many Americans believe that when the stock market is up, we’re doing well—when in reality, the exact opposite is true. 

Our leaders fool us into thinking we have to invest in corporations to survive—to keep pace with inflation, to retire someday. That’s the scarcity mindset that keeps the machine humming.

I know a man from my men’s group, bless his heart, who rails endlessly about the evils of corporatism. Yet he’s loaded, and he’ll never divest from the stock market because he’s afraid he might have to suffer some pain and lose some of his creature comforts. In his case, pain would be having to sell one of his vacation homes, yet he won’t do it because he’s gotten attached to his stuff. Another word for it: greed. Just like those biglaw lawyers, he’s living a double life. And so is almost everyone else with a retirement account who owns a slice of corporate America.

We’re not going to create the New Earth with highfalutin words and a few protests. Those are fine, but they’re not enough. Talk is cheap. Real change requires action and personal sacrifice for the greater good—pain in service of something higher.

As my second-favorite, second-tier rapper from the early aughts, Ja Rule, put it, pain is love.

Imagine the pain a caterpillar endures inside its cocoon before emerging transformed. We humans are still in the larval stage of our cosmic life cycle, carrying the spiritual potential of a butterfly—the flowering of a caterpillar metamorphosed beyond its wildest dreams. Change is always painful, but if we don’t embrace it soon, we won’t even reach the pupa stage.

The way we humans operate is unsustainable. Dysfunction is accelerating, and everyone senses it on a soul level. Corporations are as relentless as insects—soulless, tireless, consuming everything in their path. Sure as Shiva, they will continue to ravage the planet of resources until there’s nothing left unless we rise up and take action. If we don’t rapidly wake up to our complicity in corporatism, our species will self-destruct and go extinct.

But we can do something about it—today.

Instead of spending five hours at a protest that changes nothing, spend five minutes doing something that actually matters: divest from the stock market.

If even half of Americans with $50,000 or less in their retirement accounts divested, we could collapse corporatism’s foundation overnight. 

Our retirement accounts are the primary funding mechanism for corporate America, which is one giant trap game built on a house of cards. If we stop feeding the beast, it dies—and something better can emerge in its place.

Talking trash about corporations you own and profit from while they ravage people and planet is like egging on a bully and pretending you’re the victim. 

When we prioritize self-interest over the greater good, what we get is a ruling regime of billionaires and demagogues—the natural byproduct of a system that rewards self-interest and greed.

I’m sure those biglaw lawyers and my friend from the men’s group know deep down they’re dancing with the devil. They just don’t want to feel the pain of change. But pain is the price of transformation.

It’s time to wake up to the double lives we’ve been living and own our share of the mess we find ourselves in.

Choose human values over corporate values.
Embrace the pain.
Divest.
And evolve.