Here’s some straight talk about spiritual activism in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 88th birthday.

I’ll start with a little story. A colleague in the nonviolent activism world was offering me support on my book tour this summer and fall. As she reached out to her contacts she would introduce me as a “spiritual activist.” I mentioned this to another friend whose response was, “you mean as opposed to a “real activist?” We had a good laugh at that, but it was food for thought.

It feels important to say it really clearly: Martin Luther King Jr. was a spiritual activist. It feels important to name that because, like Gandhi before him, it was his communion with God that was his deep source of inner freedom, courage, and moral authority. It’s important to name that because nonviolence simply isn’t possible without at least a certain level of spiritual maturity.

By spiritual maturity I mean having a connection to our spiritual essence as human beings. I mean being on a path, with intentions and practices, that cultivates the connection with our essence as direct experience, not with a particular goal in mind, but because there is an organic longing toward this aspect of our maturity. It’s our personal communion with the very Source of Being (call it God, the Absolute, Great Spirit, the Great Intelligence, whatever you want—the words are not what matters, what matters is the felt experience that there is something greater than the self). In the process, we move in the direction of knowing what we truly are as human beings.

Without a taste of what lies beyond the personal, we are unlikely to hold to nonviolent values when we find ourselves challenged. Remember, a classic tenet of nonviolence is the willingness to suffer, even onto death, for a cause greater than oneself. We won’t be particularly inclined to do that if we’re stuck in a small, limited sense of self.

MLK Jr. National Historic Site

Even on a much less grandiose scale, we are unlikely to contribute the healing energy—the peace, love, and compassion—the world needs without spiritual maturity.

Connection to our spiritual essence is the deep source of inner freedom, courage and moral authority for all of us! And because it is consciousness itself, most fundamentally in the form of the belief in separateness, that lies at the root of violence and our collective crisis, spiritual maturity and the transformation of consciousness it represents is our best hope for saving life on Earth!

This gets us into the subtlety and sacredness of our task as activists, and the importance of a consistently nonviolent approach. The energy that’s really doing the work of social change is spiritual. It’s the work of the Great Intelligence itself, consciousness itself.

Hence, the energy we put into the mix matters; our intentions matter. Nonviolence is about keeping it human—acknowledging the basic dignity of every living thing, including those who offend us the most.

It’s crystal clear to me that not deepening the belief in separateness is our most important task. As we hold to that intention we do our part to create a life-affirming worldview. The results won’t necessarily be obvious but the seeds will have been planted and the effects will ripple out. Just as the life of Dr. King continues to reverberate through the simple force of its integrity.

Note: A later version of this article was published in Elephant Journal.