Beyond the appearances of history there is a great and glorious unfolding plan for the destiny of nations. According to mystical traditions, God carries this plan within His mind, seeking always, in every way, channels for its furtherance. His plan for the evolution of humanity, and the preparation of teachers to guide it, is called within the esoteric traditions the Great Work.

Contribution to this work is not unique to any one nation or people. On every continent, in every age, there have been spectacular contributions made to humanity’s journey toward the fullness of our being. Worldly institutions are useful in advancing God’s plan for the enlightenment of the world, to the extent to which the ideals of that institution reflect the highest philosophical truths. The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and other great beams of American light have reflected and furthered the evolutionary arc of humanity’s progress.

Yet no mortal, and no nation made up of mortals, is immune to pride or ego or selfishness or greed. Where immoderate ambition or brute power take hold, the fragile bond is broken between the spirit of the Great Work and the structure that contained it. The work continues; it always continues. But it leaves behind what becomes unworthy of it and gravitates toward truer hearts.

In modern sociological terms, there is a phenomenon called the “local discontinuity of progress.” The next step forward in a system rarely comes from a predictable place. Grace is not logical, nor can brilliant insight be rationally formulated. Where human beings pride themselves, the spirit of God departs. Human arrogance is not a container for God, nor will it ever be.

When a particular group or structure fails to keep faith with the spirit of love—not measured by its words but by its actions—that structure then loses the privilege of guardianship of the Great Work. The plan passes on to other groups or structures. Human beings cannot stop or pervert the work of destiny, but we can dissociate ourselves from its higher enfoldment. Having done so, then we will cease to share in its blessings.

America has been a vessel for the Great Work from its inception. Now, however, we have in many ways lost our conscious contact with the greatness of our destiny. We ignore invisible principles yet obsess about all manner of visible pursuits. We allow our time and attention to be frittered away in a scramble for things too shallow to satisfy us even if we can attain them. Having overcome so many forms of external dysfunction, we are now bound up by internal ones.

But powers greater than we continue to minister to humanity. Today, as always, any heart or institution that surrenders itself becomes a channel for the vibrations of love still emanating from the mind of God. It is never too late to change our minds, to self-correct, to embrace the notion that all men are brothers, that indeed we are one, that what we do to anyone we are doing to ourselves, and that in time we will come to see this and know this and live this in truth.

America keeps trying to find the right drivers, when instead we should be questioning what road we’re on. Contrary to what we are told, the road that we are currently on is not full of just light; the road ahead is full of consequences. But there is another road that America can take, a road of high and enlightened purpose for both our abundance and our genius.

Material expansion will take care of itself if we take care of all things true and beautiful. For those whose hearts respond to this thought, it is time to break through the superstitious thinking that might lead us to believe it’s too late to change. We can change; in fact, we are changing. That is our destiny. A question that faces us is this: can we re-create politics and society to reflect these things, or must the pursuit of higher truth remain separate from the public sphere? This moment is one of opportunity for the creation of a new civic force field. It is up to each and every one of us to decide where America goes now.

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OUR TASK IS to create a political context for higher questioning, for national self-definition beyond economic and military power, for national purpose beyond increasing our economic status, and for national compassion as a value upon which our nation stands. The essential question of our day is this: Do we lead with our values, or with economic and military might?

If love comes first, then money comes second; and if money comes first, then love comes second. Those who see economics as the primary determinant of our “vital interests” aren’t always looking for the loving solution to domestic or international problems. If love came first, we would use our financial resources to create jobs to help people live well instead of building more prisons to punish them when they do not; if love came first, we would value human rights at least as much as economic rights; if love came first, we would seek to educate and help rather than to prosecute our children violently screaming out for attention.

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Do we, as a nation, really want to be a small portion of the world’s population consuming the lion’s share of the world’s resources, calling our absolute right to do so our “vital national interest,” thus sowing seeds for our own inevitable comeuppance?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Should corporate power drive the financial engines of the world, pushing more and more corners of the planet in the direction of uncontrolled economic growth while, in fact, the natural resources of the earth are already maxed out?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Are we content responding to the rage and despair of millions of underprivileged Americans with an ever more lucrative system of punishment rather than a committed system of education and “economic revitalization?

• FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What is the state of our democracy today, and can we make it through the crises that confront us?

These are important questions, of course. And they will only be answered adequately if we, the American people, are willing to ask and answer them for ourselves.

THE QUESTION BEFORE us is: how do people who have reclaimed their spirituality best effect political change? We have already established that only nonviolent resistance is acceptable to the spiritual seeker, and ultimately it is the only kind of resistance that is truly effective anyway. When a power dominates the physical world, it is in looking beyond the physical world that we find our victory.

Just as David took on the giant Goliath, there is an emerging gestalt of spiritually based activism around the world, ready and willing to form a wave of resistance to multinational corporate dominance of the planet and its peoples. As usual, Goliath is bigger than we are. As usual, Goliath is totally armored and defended. As usual, Goliath laughs at his critics. As usual, Goliath taunts his enemies.

But consider this as well: as usual, Goliath moves slowly. As usual, Goliath is not as smart as he thinks he is. As usual, Goliath’s Third Eye is uncovered; one hit in the middle of his forehead, and the giant will go down. Make your words your slingshot. Make his conscience your bull’s-eye, and he cannot help but transform.

The evil, as well as the ultimate vulnerability of the giant, is that it is not human. Its life force is not the spirit at the center of the universe, but merely corporate papers filed away somewhere. A corporate mentality whose bottom line is money, not love, is a thing—it is not a human. Of itself it has no heart or soul, or conscience. It cannot cry, or fall in love, or conceive a child, or feel pain. That is what makes it a dangerous guide to human affairs, and also what makes its days so numbered. A force that is not alive is now ruling the world, and nature will not endure that forever.

To be sure, there are human beings who run that corporate machinery, but they themselves are often slaves to its functioning. I’ve been told by corporate CEOs who fully agreed with me in theory that their policies were at least potentially threatening to the planet and its peoples, “Marianne, I know what you’re saying, but I’m answerable to my stockholders. If I bungle it this quarter and don’t increase their bottom line, I’ll be out, and the person who replaces me will probably be worse than me.” Until stockholders make it clear to corporate powers that we don’t want our investments to yield financial profit at the expense of the quality of human lives, then many corporations will continue to place economic values before human ones. Socially conscious investors hold a key to the development of corporate conscience.

Until the 1980s, it was commonly appreciated that corporations had a responsibility to something beyond their financial shareholders; that they were accountable to stakeholders that included workers and the larger society as well. Yet in the 1980s there was a huge shift in this country, as the very idea of short-term economic gain became a new American god. And now we have to shift things back. We either serve a god of money, or a God of Love. We cannot have it both ways.

The person of conscience, deeply committed to a radical change in human civilization—from a dangerous, unsustainable order to a veritable garden for our children and grandchildren—must be willing to risk being considered a whiner, or worse, by polite society. Living a meaningful life is not a popularity contest. If everything we’re saying always receives applause, then perhaps we’re not saying all the right things yet. And there’s nothing unspiritual about yelling “Fire!” if the house indeed is burning down.

The nonviolent revolutionary in fact has a responsibility to be a thorn in the side of a complacent status quo. The person of conscience holds up a mirror to the world, which must include him- or herself. The lover of humanity is an agent of awakening, in a world where there is a collective urge to sleep.

Who is going to change the public conversation from shallow economic inanity to passionate human concern, if not you and me? It is true that in many environments, to bring up the unnecessary suffering of millions—and the policies that perpetuate that suffering—might quickly get you slapped with a label of “bleeding heart.” Or, these days, “snowflake.” But there’s an answer to that: Any time someone calls you a snowflake, tell them to expect an avalanche.

And take heart. All you need is one person in the room to say, “Actually, I agree with that,” and we’re starting to act like participants in a broad-based social change.

Just saying those things is not enough, of course; there is much more we need to do than just talk. But once the words have left your mouth, they tend to be more alive within you.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead gave us a perfect slogan for such times as these: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world,” she said. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This isn’t going to be easy, because the war against the fundamentals of our democracy has been extreme recently. Only a massive citizen uprising—among other things at the polls in local, state, and federal elections—will be able to turn back the tide of undemocratic forces now unleashed among us. But while the days ahead might be difficult for our country, I would still bet on a long-term positive prognosis for America. For while Americans are often slow to wake up to problems in our midst, we slam it like nobody’s business once we do.

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FROM CORPORATE AGRICULTURAL giants turning the American farmer into an economic serf, to the injection of all manner of potentially dangerous chemical and genetic elements into our food production processes merely to increase corporate profits, to the displacement of people throughout the world to smaller and smaller corridors of economic and social opportunity when they no longer serve the machinery of international financial institutions, to the suppression of democratic protests against such economic dominance, to a system of corporate welfare that makes it so much easier for the rich to do business in America than for the poor to even get started, Americans are seeing things that are clearly antithetical to the ideals on which this nation was founded.

Indignation among people of conscience is rising—among both conservatives and liberals. Democracy itself is not a Left-Right issue. A coalition of the decent is now forming in America and hopefully it will restore the souls of both major political parties. As it does, and most particularly as we the people awaken to the dangers in our midst, the chains that now bind our national conscience will be broken, because David could sing and David had a slingshot and David loved the Lord with all his heart and all his might. He knew that “the Lord saves not with sword and spear.” The Lord saves with love, as all of us know in the depths of our souls. We must love the oppressed and we must love the oppressor, but we must refuse to participate in the oppression itself. We must name the game, tell truth to power, and rise above the battlefield not in anger but in love, not in fear but in hope, not in cynicism but in absolute conviction that here, in these United States, we have always risen to the challenge of justice, and now, in our day, we will do the same. The game isn’t over. It has only just begun. We do love justice and we do love democracy; we do love our children enough to make a stand for their safety against the environmental encroachments of an invisible order; and we do love America enough to turn our attention back to politics and reclaim that realm for our most honorable impulses, compassionate feelings, and noble thoughts.

When this book was first published in 1997, I wrote that there was a storm ahead, or an awakening ahead. Alas, the storm is upon us. But even now, in the midst of our national turmoil, there is an awakening as well. People are remembering the radicalism of the American experiment, the drama and power of democracy as well as its fragility. It cannot long survive in the absence of a population awakened to our responsibility to vigilantly protect it. Americans were sleeping but now we’re waking. A giant has been aroused that was too long napping. Among the rich and among the poor, among men and among women, among old and among young, among people of all colors and all faiths and traditions, millions and millions are looking at what’s happening in our country and are saying, with genuine passion in our hearts, to all the forces that would destroy our democracy, with courage and with conviction, “Hell no.”

“PLATO SAID THAT “to philosophize and concern oneself with politics are one and the same thing.” Many now expand our political activism to include spiritual growth work, in order that we might ourselves become facilitators of change. And many now expand our perception of spiritual practice to include political activism, that we might most profoundly extend our compassion into the world.

A path of love takes conscious effort. Many Americans have the unfortunate habit of waking up every morning and surrendering their lives to fear. Newspapers, TV, or Internet assault our nervous systems and hook us into the anxiety-ridden miasma of contemporary culture before we’re even out the door. And that will need to change, if we are to rise to the occasion. The only way we can create a more peaceful world is if we are able to become more peaceful people.

The cultivation of hallowed silence, meditation, or prayer; even a small amount of inspirational literature, a minimum amount of yoga or mindful technique; these are things that counter fear and help lift us above regions of low-grade hysteria. After we meditate, we’re ready to read the paper; after we’re inspired, we’re better prepared to be informed.

Politics can be a tremendous temptation to stray from our spiritual center. One more crazy tweet, and we’re angry. One more Congressional action that belies the whoredom of our political system, and our judgmental mind goes off the charts. The ego within us loudly proclaims both our anger and our fear. No louder voice, but only silence itself, can stop the noise within. What we most need to hear today, we can only hear when the mind is quiet.

Devotional silence is a powerful tool for healing hearts and healing nations; as any of us grow closer to God, all of us grow closer to each other. The true religious or spiritual experience, through love and forgiveness, unites instead of separates. Now, a global grassroots movement—made up of people from all religions and no religions—is gathering to forge an experience of universal oneness. This movement, spontaneous, international, and inspired—will ultimately join all hearts.

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POWER DOESN’T FLOW from the top down, but from the bottom up. Wisdom doesn’t flow from the outside in, but from the inside out. Both of those spiritual tenets are at the core of a highly functioning democratic process. Where a top-down, authoritarian power holds sway, democracy is diminished. Where people get their guidance only from external sources, as opposed to the goodness of our own hearts, democracy is diminished as well. Disconnection from our internal selves produces a decrease in personal energy, and where personal energy diminishes, the last thing we feel we have time for is participation in the democratic process. Tired people don’t do democracy, and that is why a distracted, burdened, overstressed population is literally a threat to our liberty. President Eisenhower said, “Politics should be the part-time profession of every American.” But tell that to someone who already has two or three part-time jobs!

One way to reconnect our personal and political energy is through a process called Citizen Circles. These are small, spontaneous groups, in which two or more join together to hold the vision of a healed America. To “hold a vision” is to hold a thought, and thought is the most powerful, creative force in the universe. We are, as a species, only beginning to tap into the true power of our spiritual imagination—the wings we have been given but have not yet begun to collectively use. A thought grows more powerful the more people hold it. “An invasion of armies can be resisted,” wrote Victor Hugo, “but not an idea whose time has come.” The Berlin Wall came down because the love of freedom literally overcame the physical and political structures that resisted it. We, too, can make a bloodless transition to a better social order. We can so consciously embrace a world of justice and compassion, that such a world will literally be magnetized into manifestation. Such is the miraculous power of the human mind.

Citizen Circles open with a prayer or inspirational quote, remaining both religiously and spiritually inclusive. Twenty minutes of silence follow. For some people this is a time for prayer or meditation, while for others it is merely a time for personal reflection. Our wisdom, being rooted in silence, is then more clearly brought to bear upon our social and political lives.

There is a power in stillness that counters the cacophonous, hysterical energy that dominates so much of our popular culture today. Sharing silence in groups is a powerful way, in the words of Gandhi, to help “make politics sacred.” At the beginning of the devotional silence is a Quaker-type exercise, in which those who feel so moved say, “I see an America in which . . .” followed by their vision of a healed nation. We might see a nation or world in which all children are safe and happy and educated. Or see a world in which the earth is healthy and the water and air are clean. We might see a world in which all nations live together in peace. Or an America in which the races live in harmony and joy together, and so on. This process gives all participants an opportunity to speak their sacred word, and thus exercise their spiritual power to re-create the world. People’s hearts long to create the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Words spoken in normal speech do not necessarily carry spiritual power, but words spoken in sacred process, emerging from silence and with heartfelt dedication to the common good, carry moral authority for both the speaker and the listener.

Seven principles guide our spiritual/political practice:

1. The powers within us—mind and spirit—are greater than all powers outside.
2. Forgiveness and love are both our goal for the world and our means of achieving that goal.
3. We do not look away from the problems of the world, for that is negative denial. Rather, we look toward them and pray to be agents of positive change.
4. We embrace both the love and the sorrows of the world, for what is embraced with love is automatically delivered to realms of more positive unfoldment.
5. We will take constructive political action, in accordance with the opportunities afforded us as citizens of a democratic society. But we do not act only in order to oppose what is; we act in order to make another, more positive choice for the future.
6. We seek peace within ourselves at all times, for lack of peace within us will be reflected outside ourselves.
7. We see citizenship as a moral responsibility, to be used in love’s service, for the creation of a better, more just, more compassionate world.

CIRCLES CAN HELP to ground new political energy.

The key to a successful Citizen Circle is that we speak from the heart about subjects that matter. The agenda includes:

1. Silent meditation or nondenominational devotion.
2. Discussion or visualization of what we as individuals would wish America, or the world, to be like.
3. An educational element such as group reading and discussion. If the meeting is weekly, perhaps one member of the group brings in an article or chapter of a book for group discussion.
4. Citizen lobbying. With every article or discussion, the group should then plan a specific lobbying action, such as letters to an elected official. Remember, we do not all have to be lobbying for the same things or expressing the same opinions.
5. Part of the value of these meetings is that they provide a chance to hear the views of those whom we know are just as intelligent as we, but see things from a different political perspective. If splinter groups grow out of that, whereby we lobby for common things, that is fine and good. But listening to other people’s viewpoints keeps our own from calcifying.

Many people open their Circles with prayer, such as the following one:

Dear God,
We come together,
different perspectives,
different politics,
different cultures,
to ask that you heal our country.
We surrender to You
the thoughts and attitudes we now hold,
and empty our minds that they might
be filled by You.
Show us to each other,
as You would have us see each other.
Show us the world,
as You would have us see the world.
Guide our listening,
as You would have us hear each other.
Teach us, and inspire us.
Use us on Your behalf.
Amen

In an environment where prayer is either inappropriate or perceived as threatening to some members of the group, a generalized reference to “the spirit of goodness within all of us” or “the love [or light] within our minds” carries with it the power to bring groups of people into spiritual alignment with each other and a higher power.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearance of the world there is a benign power. To say God is personal is not to make Him an object among other objects or attribute to Him the finiteness and limitations of human personality; it is to take what is finest and noblest in our consciousness and affirm its perfect existence in Him.”

The greatest power is neither money nor technological device; the greatest power is the power of consciousness. So it is that a new politics centers around the arousal of that power, using prayer and meditation to create a force field of transformation.

The following are some suggestions for the kinds of prayers that break up old political thought patterns:

1. Pray for every one of the fifty states.
2. Pray for help in giving up judgment toward whatever person in public life, or group of people, you tend to judge.
3. Pray for the children of America.
4. Pray for the leaders of America.
5. Pray for the poor in America.
6. Pray for America’s incarcerated population.
7. Pray for all drug addicts and alcoholics.
8. Pray for America’s sick.
9. Pray for America’s relationship with all other nations.
10. Pray for atonement and amends toward those who have been wronged by us as a nation.
11. Pray for racial healing. Atone for the systemic racism that permeates our social policies today, and surrender your own thoughts as well.
12. Pray for parents and children in America.
13. Pray for husbands and wives in America.
14. Pray for all lovers and friends.
15. Pray for America’s environment.
16. Pray for the American economy.
17. Pray for American education.
18. Pray for American health care.
19. Pray for America’s homeless.
20. Pray that you might become a better American citizen.

The following are some prayers that might assist your efforts:

Dear God,
There was born on this land
a possibility of freedom
more expansive than the world had ever known. And the promise still exists.
There is freedom here
for some,
dear Lord,
but clearly not for all. And the promise still exists.
Help us, Lord,
to free our country from the chains
of our hardened hearts. And the promise still exists.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless our children,
and the children of the world. May their innocence remain.

Dear God,
Please bless their tender souls.
Lead them away from harsh stimulation
and the violent ways which hurt them.
Cast out of us the things which offend
the spirit of love
in all of us.
Make our children free of all the darkened things in life,
and make us free as well,
dear Lord.
Make us free as well.
In these United States
and in the world,
may only love remain.
Amen

Dear God,
We are the richest nation,
the most blessed of places,
we praise you, Lord, and thank you.
Surely the bounty You have given us
is meant by You to bless the world,
Please show us how,
dear God.
Please re-create our culture,
renew our tired lives.
Let light and love
flow down on us,
our country
and our world.
Amen

Dear God,
We bless the souls of those who founded these United
States, of all who came before us,
and who struggle still today,
to bring forth all the greatness
and the glory of America.
Thank you, God,
and them.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless the people of America,
and all people throughout the world.
Use me, God,
in whatever way
You would have me serve.
Show me how to live my life
in such a way as to spread the love
which feeds and redeems us all.
Amen

Dear God,
May the angels
of America
burst forth across this land,
healing hearts and
blessing souls.
May they awaken yet
the cry of freedom
in one and all.
Release us from bondage,
release us from fear.
Amen

Dear God,
Turn back the fist
that sits upon the process of our furtherance,
limiting our good.
Remove it from our hearts,
remove it from our streets,
remove it from our government,
remove it from our land.
Thank you, God.
Amen.

Dear God,
Please forgive this country
for the racism,
past and present,
which so hides Your light.
Take from us any thoughts we hold,
or feelings we have,
which make firm the wrong.
Please show us how to create anew
American society,
that truly we might be as brothers.
Thank you very much,
Amen

Dear God,
We don’t even know
all the things which are wrong in this country,
but You do,
dear Lord,
You do.
Please reveal to us
what You would have revealed,
and take from us what You would take.
Thank you, God.
Amen

Dear God,
May our essential nature
as a country
and a people,
awaken on this day.
May the glorious possibilities
of our miraculous beginnings
once more enchant our hearts and
set us free
of limitation.
Break the chain
of dominance
which false power holds upon us still.
Renew the spirit
of freedom and love
which are Your truth within us.
Amen

Dear God,
Please help us change America,
from a land of violence
to a land of love.
Where there is separation,
please bring union.
Where there is distrust and pain,
please bring reconciliation of our hearts
with each other,
and with You.
May all be blessed
and prosper,
here and throughout the world.
And so it is.
Amen

Dear God,
Lead us
where You would have us go,
show us
what You would have us do.
Guide us
in what You would have us say,
and to whom,
that we might serve You best.
Give us hope
that there is yet
another way.
We are open,
we are willing,
we are waiting for Your hand
upon our shoulders and our hearts.
May Your will still yet be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Amen

Dear God,
Please give every mother’s child
enough to eat,
in America
and everywhere.
Give every mother’s child
good work to do,
and the strength to do it,
in America and everywhere.
Give every mother’s child
the wisdom to see,
and the courage to act,
and the heart to forbear,
in America and everywhere.
Use us to help You, Lord,
to make these things so.
Amen

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for how we offend Your spirit,
ignoring the poor,
yet feeding the rich,
not fostering peace,
yet making fortunes
on the instruments of war.
Please turn us around, dear God
and heal our minds
and hearts.
Please open our eyes,
transform our minds,
that we might be
instruments of love.
Amen

Dear God,
I know not where to go,
but You do.
I know not what to do,
but You do.
I know not how to be,
but You do,
to change this world,
to heal this country.
Please show me, Lord,
for I would do my part.
Amen

Dear God,
Please bless our Congress,
our President,
our judges,
and all elected officials,
and the people of the United States,
with wisdom
and light
and love.
Please bless those who have no voice,
and lend them mine.
Amen

Dear God,
There are those
who have too little hope.
There are those who try,
yet feel their dreams
shot down.
There are those who love,
yet feel forgotten
in the madness and the crowds.
Please help them all.
Open wide our hearts
and eyes
and ears,
that we might know and hear each other,
in our joy
and in our pain.
Amen

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SOCIAL CHANGE EMERGES more from a vertical than from a horizontal axis. A consensus of people joined passionately in an internal shift will do more to affect the conditions of the world than millions of people joined in superficial external changes. The morphic resonance of loving thought is a literal force field, not just a metaphorical concept. It is the sacred of which Gandhi spoke, carrying more potential power than a nuclear bomb or military force. Martin Luther King, Jr., said “We have within us a power more powerful than bullets.” The question is not whether this power exists, or even whether enough people believe that it exists; the question for our time is whether enough of us are prepared to harness that power for the purpose of national and planetary healing. To speak of love is one thing; to sit in silence with others, to pray, to speak from our hearts, to envision a loving future, to forgive ourselves and each other—these are something else altogether. They are the tools of nonviolence and the seeds of a brand-new world. Where some have harnessed fear and bigotry for political purposes, let us now harness love.

Years ago, as I drove past a Planned Parenthood clinic in a central California town, I noticed that on one side of the driveway were protesters with picket signs, while on the other side of the driveway was a woman wearing a bulletproof vest, on top of which was written “Clinic.” I was stunned at the sight of such a thing here in America.

People who are free to debate their views but define that debate as screaming at each other, people who are free to express their opinions but dishonor the opinions of others, are not practicing democracy but are in the process of destroying it. Our forefathers foresaw for us a deliberative, consensus-building, reasonable form of political debate. But a generation for whom a culture of distraction in too many ways competes with a culture of depth has had difficulty developing the social maturity necessary for the authentic practice of democracy. Such practice demands our capacity to speak from our depths and listen from our depths. Cultural cacophony is an enemy of democracy.

A challenge of our time is to create an alternative political culture. If our goal is to do that, then it’s not just the content of our political conclusions but also the process by which we arrive at them that needs to be addressed.

I was once giving a lecture to a large audience when the subject of abortion came up in the discussion period of the program. Tensions began to surface; a rip in the emotional fabric of the room was obvious to everyone. One choice was to go for a false positivism, pretending we’re all so “spiritual” here that we don’t have to delve into issues like that. Such a choice is not transcendence but denial, healing nothing and no one. Another choice was to open the discussion—go for it and see what happens. A third choice offered a different way: I asked those in the room to close their eyes and remain in silence for two minutes. I asked that we look within ourselves and call on the spirit of goodness that resides there. I suggested we ask for the soul’s wisdom regarding this issue, surrendering our perceptions into the hands of God.

After our two minutes of silence, we resumed conversation. Everyone in the room was quieter, more accepting and compassionate toward the views of others, and more eloquent in stating their own views. What came forward, then, was not so much anyone’s particular opinions but everyone’s capacity to communicate more deeply. People were truly heard that night by people who had previously dismissed their views out of hand. The “right answer” is not a particular view on policy, so much as an experience of each other in which the process of meaningful communication is restored.

We don’t need to extend democracy out into the world, so much as to deepen it within ourselves. The day after that lecture, someone who was there remarked to me, “I felt like last night I had an intimate living room conversation regarding abortion with two thousand people.” From that intimacy did come healing, and from that kind of healing will come a new America.

At the deepest level, we don’t want—nor can we sustain—a political culture in which we’re fighting each other all the time. Debating, yes. Having a vigorous contest of ideas, yes. But fighting? Truly opposing one another as has come to be the norm in our society? No. A smug, self-righteous, intolerant Left-winger is no less dangerous to the fabric of this country than is a smug, self-righteous, intolerant Right-winger. We need a politics that rests not on personal destruction, but on imagination and creation. Politics should be an art form, and it should actually be enjoyable.

ONE NIGHT AT one of my lectures, we did the Citizen Circle process of declaring the America we would like to see. Scores of people were proclaiming, “I see an America in which. . . .” After doing the exercise, I went off the stage for a twenty-minute intermission.

When I returned, it was time for a different part of my presentation: responding to questions handed in from members of the audience. I had been doing this format—lecture, intermission, then questions and answers—for years, yet this night was different. Almost every time I read a question, before I could even say anything in response, someone in the audience would speak up! Not raise a hand, but just blurt out an answer—and always a good one. Something significant had occurred from merely participating in that exercise; people had subtly shifted from passive to active, from a mode where “someone else has the answers” to one where “I have the answers.” People hadn’t just become wise that night, of course, but many had come closer to owning their wisdom that night.”

Within minutes, people were talking—completely unprompted by me—of which companies produce their products in countries where child labor is used; the tenets of socially responsible investing; how to include infant and child care in a corporate environment; economic injustice and the U.S. tax code; the dangers of gutting environmental regulations. It was like tired flowers that had finally been put in water: people are so hungry to participate in something bigger than ourselves, after years of putting our energies into merely self-centered goals. There is such a thing as group intelligence and group conscience, and democracy cannot live without it. Average citizens joined in a dignified environment of deliberation and consensus building—not back rooms where corporate lobbyists get to call most of the shots. That is the engine that should drive America.

Our collective cynicism and citizen fatigue is the biggest obstacle to breaking democracy’s free fall. Some say they don’t participate more because there doesn’t seem to be any one issue to rally around like there was in the Sixties; some say they feel hopeless, and that it doesn’t matter what you do or who you vote for anyway; some say that dark money has it all sewn up, and so on. But in reality, money—as powerful as it is—doesn’t actually vote. Power has been grabbed from the people, that’s true; but it has also been abdicated by the people, and we should take responsibility for that.

There seems to be no one issue to rally around because so many today are fraught with problems. But the deeper issue is within us: a citizen malaise now ending, opening our country to new possibilities because we are opening to something new within ourselves. We are reclaiming what generations before us had, and which we desperately need again: a sense that we, as citizens, actually matter. A sense that what we think, how we feel, and how we vote actually matters.

I don’t think Americans are apathetic, but too many have begun to feel, rightfully so, that nothing they did made any difference. That has produced within us a kind of all-pervasive societal depression, and it is that which needs to heal now. We cannot turn away from politics; we must re-create the field. For as the French often say, “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.” And boy, it has. But politics is not a rigid institution. In truth, it will be anything we choose it to be, and people are starting to do what we have to do to put America back on track. Call it the nonviolent resistance, call it woke, call it whatever. But know that it’s happening.

Big changes in the world begin with small movements in the mind. And those who first perceive these changes do not reasonably expect applause. When integrative medicine first burst onto the scene, no one asked the American Medical Association’s permission. Medical physicians made fun of many of us, as we held support groups, prayed for patients, stressed the power of forgiveness to boost the immune system, and so on. But it’s a whole new world now—our most prestigious medical institutions now acknowledge the psycho-immunological factor, the effects of spirituality and consciousness in healing the physical body—and former cynics are not laughing anymore.

So, of course, traditional political types will laugh at a metapolitical emphasis where love, atonement, peace, and reverence for life are seen as dominant political values. That’s okay; they won’t laugh forever. Politicians, like medical doctors, aren’t demi-gods anymore. They’re our partners in healing society. What we need in America now is not so much a visionary leader or a visionary media; what we need is a visionary constituency, and that is what is forming. Organizations and projects are popping up all over the country, helping to build that constituency, giving us a framework for meaningful silence, meaningful discussion, and meaningful political action.

Inner activism meets outer activism: Voilà! Holistic politics.

Chapter 8 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

Chapter 6: Old Powers, New Powers

All abundance comes from within, as consciousness precedes matter. Our economic policy should be this: to teach and remind every American of his or her inestimable value and potential, to create the contexts in which those gifts are most easily mined, and then strictly adhere to the ethical standards by which each person is held accountable for what he or she does and does not do. Banks should not be at the center of our economic policy. The stock market should not be at the center of our economic policy. We should be at the center of our economic policy. Our children, our education, our health, our creativity, and our potential for genius.

We have replaced ethics with economics over the last few decades, replacing relational models of human interaction with transactional sales pitches in order to “get what we want.” We were taught that this is the way to win, to sell the product, to get the ultimate reward. But the days are nearing an end when that kind of thinking will produce even a simulated version of abundance. It is thinking that is spiritually impoverished and will ultimately produce only material impoverishment.

The operative word in the phrase “wealth creation” is not wealth but creation. Our greatest untapped gold mine is the place within us where we learn to create material wealth out of the wealth of the spirit. And that we can’t do by making money our goal, because the spirit will not be bought. While counterintuitive to current social wisdom, it is our purity and not our lack of it that is the key to manifesting wealth. It is a riddle, of course, because once you say, “Okay, so I’ll be pure if that will make me more money,” then you’ve lost your purity. Money comes from energy. That energy is like a magical bird that flies away from greed, overattachment, and lack of integrity. Working on our characters is the most powerful way now to work on our careers.

When I was in my twenties, I worked many jobs. At one point, I was scooping soup at Salmagundi’s Restaurant in San Francisco. In walked a young man one day, an old friend I had not seen since high school, dressed in a pinstripe suit, out for lunch with his legal associates. He had been one of the smart kids at school, but so had I. I was traumatized to see him: I didn’t want him to register the fact that while he was now a hot shot, I was scooping soup.

He was friendly to me, but there was pity on his face. I have never forgotten that moment.

For what had happened in Charles’s life that had not happened in mine was that he figured out how to make it in America. I had fallen through the cracks, though that was not supposed to happen, given my family and background. I couldn’t get myself to think the way I was told to think or move ahead in the ways I was supposed to move ahead. Yet I knew that day at Salmagundi’s that I was carrying a diamond in my pocket. I hadn’t gone to law school, but I had been traveling far and wide. I had experienced, while most of my friends were climbing ladders, realms of adventure that they thought they had to leave behind. I didn’t know if I would ever get anywhere in the world, but I knew that there was an inner dimension to the life I was living that was brighter and cleaner than the world my friends were hailing as true success.

I have seen incredible things in my life, and one of them is that the spiritual diamond in my pocket became a key to success as the world defines it. Unknowingly, I had visited the void out of which comes overflowing materialization. That void, or no-thing, is the creative source of all abundance.

Internal abundance produces external abundance. That is true for an individual, and it is true for a nation. The life of the spirit is the source of all good.

A modern Wizard of Oz is the so-called science of economics. Economist Hazel Henderson has written, “Economics is now revealed as a 300-year-old grab bag of unverifiable propositions too vague to be refuted.” Economists are like a group of people who came out of nowhere and all of a sudden run the world. Who made them boss? In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “Nothing in history has been so disgraceful to the human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of economics as a science.” Economists do not normally include in their calculations such spiritual precepts as the Golden Rule, but the law of karma supersedes the laws of economics.

There are those who would say that to run a country with love in mind is not practical. But the argument that love is not practical is but a smokescreen. Of course, it is not practical. But what is practical? No one is saying love is practical, but only that it is good. Nowhere in the Bible, or in any other major spiritual source material that I have read, are we told to do what is practical. Would it take a lot of hours and debate and work and analysis to figure out how best to apply our resources toward the eradication of human suffering, here and throughout the world? Yes. Just about as many hours as it now takes figuring out how to wage espionage, create weapons of destruction, and produce the endless streams of things that we obsessively buy but do not need.

Love is as serious a subject, as difficult a subject, and as sophisticated a subject as money. Why should we treat economics more seriously than love? God is love, and love is the only abundance. Everything else is just the toys we’ve been playing with at an immature level of our spiritual development.

From a spiritual perspective, no nation as wealthy as ours, with as many underprivileged children as we have, has any basis for long-term economic optimism whatsoever.

Doesn’t love already rule the world, really? Isn’t it love that makes people do what they think they could never do, and go where they thought they could never go? Is not nature wise, in its programming of mothers to instinctively love our children? Does this not guarantee the propagation of the species? Does not a tigress, or a lioness, grow fierce when she senses a threat to her cubs? Is not a species whose mothers are not so fiercely protective of their young unconsciously heading toward its own destruction?

Our challenge now is to expand our concept of love and family to include the children on the other side of town. And it is not enough to merely love our own children—so did many slave owners and Nazi officers, apparently. We must love all the children, here and throughout the world. To withhold love from any child is to withhold support from the future, and time is speeding up now.

As long as we stay resistant to a deeper, more penetrating discussion of the interior forces that rule the world, then our options for national recovery remain limited. Love will be allowed to save us, or violence will destroy us. Hatred cannot be endlessly managed, but it can, though the grace of God, be undone. It is overwhelmed, as is all darkness, in the presence of love. To understand that mystery, and to learn to live it, is the salvation of the human race. God is one, therefore you and I are one. God is one, therefore all nations are one. That is not a thought humanity has outgrown; it is a thought we have not yet quite grown deep enough to understand.

We must free the subject of love from the mental prison where it has been relegated by our pseudo-sophisticated bias. We should resist the tacit prejudice against its discussion in any other context but the romantic or the mundane. We are quickly coming upon an age when the question of what it means to love will define our science, our educational systems, indeed our politics. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

IN 1997, SOME citizens in Oklahoma City created a project spearheaded by the late Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Alma Wilson. It is called the Seeworth Preparatory School, and its original mission was to address the problem of that state’s “kids at risk.” This means young people who don’t make it in the public school system, who have gotten into either major or minor trouble, and who, after being thrown out of school, usually find themselves sooner or later in jail.

Justice Wilson made a commitment to interrupting the destructive pattern in these children’s lives. The system said it had “tried everything.” Justice Wilson suggested we try love.

When I visited the Seeworth School, I spent some time with the students. Had I not already been told where these kids were from, what their previous histories had been, I would never have dreamed in a million years that these were the “bad kids” we hear about so often. They were clearly young people whose lives were being redeemed and restored, through the power of love and a discipline they could understand. Lisa told me she wanted to be a lawyer, while Jennifer wanted to be a physical therapist. Dylan wanted to be a great psychologist, and Andrew wanted to be a famous artist. Steven just wanted his parents to love him.

Today, Seeworth Academy serves about five hundred students a year, and its mission has expanded beyond its original target population. The problem is that there are literally millions of Jennifers and Andrews in other places around the country, with no place like that to go. Seeworth Academy has established a template for social and emotional learning among traumatized students, based not on the idea that children have failed, but on the realization that we as a society have failed our children. This is part of what is now an underground revolution in American education.

Everywhere I go, people respond enthusiastically to the story of the Seeworth Preparatory Academy. They can see the value of such a school in their own communities. Yet our government, beholden more to economic interests than to human interests, rarely reflects that kind of sensibility. Yes, they’ll applaud it when it’s a private effort, of course, but they are not apt in today’s political climate to fund such an effort. We’ve got more important things to do with our money, such as buying additional military equipment that the Pentagon didn’t even ask for.

The truth is, our nation’s children are simply not put first in American politics. They don’t work, therefore they have no economic leverage; and without economic leverage, you don’t have much clout in Congress today. Unless your parents are wealthy, kids, then good luck to you; your health care, your education, and your general well-being are secondary political considerations, if that. Our continued withdrawal of support from our most disadvantaged communities only exacerbates the problems of kids at risk. And our fundamental response to kids in trouble now is simply to build more prisons. There has been a 500 percent increase in our prison population over the last forty years. While in the 1970s, there were approximately 300,000 incarcerated Americans, today there are over 2.3 million.

I remember a time when America at least tried to do better; when both conservatives and liberals seemed to take human suffering more seriously. In an interview in the New York Times in April 1997, former President Jimmy Carter cited inequities in the criminal justice system that often penalize blacks and other minority groups more than whites, a problem that has only been exacerbated in the years since. He said that as a young governor of Georgia, he and his contemporaries, such as the then-governors of Florida and Arkansas, had an intense competition over who had the smallest prison population.

“Now it’s totally opposite,” Mr. Carter added. “Now the governors brag on how many prisons they’ve built and how many people they can keep in jail and for how long.”

Prison is, in fact, the beast’s answer to Jennifer and Andrew. It is literally the only way that the two of them can currently contribute to the U.S. economy! It is not a mystery, what kids need in order to thrive. We know what they need in order to make it. But if their parents don’t give it to them, our message to those kids in America today is “Tough breaks. You should have worked harder. It’s really too bad.”

And if we suggest that we would spend a lot less money educating our children than on imprisoning them later, we are liable to be met with lines such as, “Money doesn’t solve these things,” or “There you go again, talking about a big government program.” But can you imagine what a major CEO would say if he or she budgeted funds for infrastructure, and you said that these things just shouldn’t cost money? No one can function well while living within the rolling trauma of economic despair, nor can their children. And in America today, no hard-working person should have to.

THE PHENOMENON OF mass incarceration has become a huge, bleeding sore on the soul of America.

While there are brilliant, dedicated individuals working within our criminal justice system, the attitudes that too often dominate the system are barbaric. American society breeds hundreds of thousands of criminals, and then says to law enforcement, “Here, you handle it.” We treat our prisons like garbage dumps to receive society’s refuse. The problem of crime has become so huge in the United States that our government has opted for a crackdown mentality in its search for an illusory “safety.” In some states, young people are still put in jail with the adult prison population. As a gentleman who works in juvenile justice said to me once, wringing his hands and with tears in his eyes, “All I can say is, if you’re going to treat these kids this way, then you better keep ’em in there a really long time.”

What occurs behind bars in the United States today should be of serious concern to all of us, particularly the racial disparity by which people of color are sentenced more harshly than whites who commit the same crimes. But the largest factor determining the path to incarceration remains economic, and most Americans would be horrified by reports of what is really going on. Most Americans think of our prisons as at least humane, but there are increasingly terrible exceptions. Brutality is of epidemic proportions.

From throughout the country come reports—and even videos—of prisoners who have not violated rules or resisted their guards, being kicked like dogs, their skulls crushed against walls by prison officials. This is not to say that every prison official is corrupt, or anything near it, but it is to say that we have a huge problem on our hands too little addressed.

And even more important, is this system working? What does it say about us that America incarcerates more of its people than any other country in the world, with almost a quarter of our prison population low-level, nonviolent drug offenders whose transgressions would best be treated in alternative ways? And have the harsh criminal justice policies instituted over the last few decades served to reduce crime in America, or only to increase profits for those who feed on it?

Awakening to the dark underbellies in America is not a fun or entertaining process, but we cannot heal unless we do.

IN HIS FAREWELL address to the nation in 1961, Republican President Eisenhower said the following:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . .

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

While Eisenhower’s comments were made in the middle of the Cold War, we clearly did not heed his warnings, either then or later. Since that time, our military expenditures have steadily increased to the point where they are 54 percent of all discretionary federal funds.

World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015, and the U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. While no one would argue against the need for military preparedness, many indeed would argue that our military budget is out of proportion with the resources by which we seek to prevent the need for military action. The budget of our Defense Department, for instance, is $600 billion, twenty-four times more than the $26.5 billion allotted to the Department of State. In the Trump administration, as a matter of fact, we are dismantling many of the diplomatic functions of our State Department and replacing them with economic advocacy projects for U.S. corporations.

Are we being served, or are we being robbed? Are we being protected, or are we being turned into a militaristic nation whose citizens are being led to believe that brute force rather than adherence to our values is the fulcrum of our security?

In 1953, alert to the dangers of a permanent armaments industry, President Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

In truth, our military budget is more an expression of the financial appetites of our military-industrial complex than it is a truly wise response to admittedly very real threats to our national security. What could be a greater threat to our long-term security than the millions of American children who have no practical access to the social and cultural blessings of American society, and the millions of American adults finding it harder and harder to make ends meet while prosperity expands for so many others in more privileged parts of town? Large groups of desperate people should be considered a national security risk, whether in a corner of an American city or in another corner of the world. Desperate people are more vulnerable to psychological capture by genuinely psychotic forces, including dangerous ideologies both here and abroad. Those forces invade us, by the way, by land, air or sea, as through the Internet.

What is happening when a nation is so much more willing to fund its vengeance than its compassion? I think we are basically a decent and compassionate people; the problem is that our government does not always reflect that. It is ruled for the most part not by the “better angels” of the American people, but by the gargantuan economic interests of a relatively few industries. Until that changes—until a massive shift in American consciousness turns the American mind back to the political process, demanding the place that “we the people” were intended to have within it, demanding campaign-finance reform, demanding that special economic interests no longer be the primary architects of our social and political policy—our own goodness will continue to be less and less reflected in the actions taken in our name. That is the basic healing America needs: not just to find its soul, but to live its soul. Our souls must be allowed to express themselves in circles of influence wider than just our private domains. Small random acts of kindness are not enough; big strategized ones are needed, too.

It is time for us to ask ourselves, “Is it possible to have a compassion-based society?” “What would such a society look like?” and “What changes need to take place in our public policies if our goal as a society is to express love instead of fear?”

Perhaps you wish to lobby your elected officials and tell them that you prefer to have your tax dollars fund the machinery of peace more than the machinery of war. Just doing that—whether making a constituent call, attending a Congressional Town Hall, or in any other way—will make a difference inside you. And someone on the other end will know you did it.

That is the miracle most needed now: a shift in us, from a passive to an activated citizenry.

The American people aren’t happy with the fact that money runs Washington more than we do. We just don’t know what to do about it. We don’t know who to turn to when both major political parties are so beholden to corporate interests. We don’t know how to express our rage, and so it shows up in our midst as apathy or denial. That is why the assumption of spiritual power is so important as a political tool.

Do we need a military? Of course we do. Do we need to radically rethink its function and its operation? Maybe we should think about that. Perhaps it would behoove us to ask ourselves why we are so disliked by many people around the globe. What relatively little money we do give to nations less fortunate than we is applied far less to humanitarian than to military use, or to prop up multinational corporate regimes that primarily serve our own economic interests. For all our talk about how generous we are, the United States has become one of the most miserly countries in the world. It is not just the nuclear bombs pointing in our direction, but all the enmity pointed in our direction, that should make every American pause and think. As one expert on chemical warfare was quoted as saying, “The only way the United States could really be safe from the threat of chemical warfare is if there weren’t so many people out there who hated us.

In the twenty-first century, spirituality, visionary consciousness, and the ability to build and mend human relationships will be more important for the fate and safety of this nation than our capacity to forcefully subdue an enemy. Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don’t want.

We spend trillions of dollars on methods of destroying life, while routinely withdrawing billions of dollars from projects and efforts that restore life.

The protection afforded us by the machinations of America’s war machine will serve us but little, if we do not address the fundamental causes of hatred and violence, here and throughout the world. We need a Department of Peace, at least as much as we need a Department of Defense.

THERE WILL BE no real peace in the world until there is peace in our hearts. And in both places, there is a big difference between the creation of true peace and mere management of the symptoms of distress.

One of the ways that we are bordering on cultural insanity, in a dysfunctional effort to suppress our pain rather than truly heal ourselves, is in the area of drugs. A system that makes a lot of noise about battling drugs is itself invested in our being stoned.

While our politicians are big on discussing America’s drug problem, they hardly ever discuss sobriety. There is a reason for this: sobriety doesn’t yet play a serious part in mainstream conversation because America hasn’t yet decided to become sober. The most significant drug stash in America is in our collective medicine chests. America has become a legally ordained drug culture.

Legal, though not necessarily morally legitimate, pharmaceutical company campaigns have set out to drug America, with far too many doctors as their willing accomplices. Our opioid crisis is one of the results, as the most common “gateway drug” to opioid addiction is a legal pharmaceutical.

America’s overmedication of itself and its children is our biggest “dirty little secret.” Notice how illegal drugs are called “drugs,” but legal drugs are called “medication.

We drop antidepressants today as though they were candy. And the last thing Americans need right now is to be artificially convinced things are really okay when in fact they are not. In addition, the FDA has issued a black box warning that for people under the age of twenty-five the use of antidepressants can increase rather than decrease the risk of suicidal ideation. Yet according to mental health watchdog group CCHR International, over 2 million of our young people under the age of seventeen are now taking them. Once again, as with so many other issues, human suffering has been turned into a profit center for corporate interests. A psychotherapeutic/pharmacological/industrial complex has medicalized the issue of depression to the point where even suffering that falls within a normal spectrum of human despair is treated as a medical issue, with little biological evidence to support the claim. Every time they tell you that depression causes a change in brain chemistry, remember that meditation does, too.

We are encouraging an entire generation of young people to rely on psychiatric drugs rather than on themselves and other human resources—not to even mention God. Clearly we are having some problems of our own when we are so quick to drug our own kids.

I’m not saying that there are never legitimate reasons for psychotherapeutic drugs, because clearly there are. But there is a difference—far too little noted today—between serious mental illness and instances of normal human despair. Bankruptcy, divorce, even the loss of a loved one—all are difficult human experiences, but they’re not mental illnesses. And sometimes the fact that you’re upset about something doesn’t mean something is wrong with you; it simply means you’re an adult living in very sobering times, alert to very serious problems and recognizing their severity. This is not a reason to sleep; it’s a reason to awaken.

Psychologist Carl Jung said, “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” As a culture, America lacks a deep understanding of the value of suffering. Contrary to popular opinion, there are times when allowing ourselves to suffer is the only way to get through the pain.

American popular culture is a cult of pleasure, which is an inappropriate response to deep unhappiness. The happiest life is an authentic life, which is not necessarily one of constant delight. Our obsessive pursuit of entertainment and cheap pleasure is both a response to and a masking of deep unhappiness. When, after fifteen minutes, the pain comes back—no matter how much fun we had and how many games we bought—we should do more than just seek to numb it.

It’s important that our bones hurt when we break them. Otherwise, how would we know that they’re broken? But if you have a broken bone, you don’t just take painkillers; you have to reset the bone. So it is with our society: the fact that so many of us endure deep psychic pain on a daily basis—one in four women in America will be diagnosed as clinically depressed—should be something more significant than a gold mine for drug manufacturers. It should be the source of deep questioning regarding what has gone so wrong and the embrace of real solutions—like maybe a serious spiritual life. Why is a pharmaceutical company that makes billions of dollars manufacturing antidepressants called a legitimate capitalist concern, but someone who suggests that we pray and meditate regularly to help treat depression liable to be called a lightweight thinker?

Americans don’t need to treat our unhappiness so much as we need to respond to it. Unhappiness is here for a reason; it is trying to tell us something. It is a sign that who we have been in our lives, and what we have been doing with our lives, is an inadequate container for the energies trying to emerge within us. Usually it is a sign that on some level we have been playing way too powerless; responding to that powerlessness with drugs is like saying that we’ll respond to a cut by cutting ourselves again.

Our war against drugs is odd, at best. It’s basically a prohibition that hasn’t worked, undertaken by a society that is itself addicted to drugs. I think we keep fighting the drug war for that reason: like any addict, we try to deflect attention away from our own use. The criminal underclass created by the “War on Drugs” costs America more in lives and money and outright human tragedy than any straight-out use of the outlawed drugs ever would if they were legal. Even more important, our children, in taking drugs, are far too often merely imitating us.

If we were intent on fighting drugs in this country, we would seriously foster recovery.

And most important, we should begin asking ourselves what the hole is inside our children, and inside us, that we are all seeking to fill so dysfunctionally. What is it about the world we have created for ourselves that we so don’t want to be here?

There will be drugs on our streets, no matter how much money we spend trying to stop them, as long as there is a spiritual wound in the gut of America’s children. And there will be that pain in them until we have adequately addressed the pain in us.

The issue is a paradigmatic one: we are on the verge of outgrowing a mind-set that says “I will deal with this problem by saying no to something” and embracing one that says “I will deal with this problem by saying yes to something else.” Notice we have a drug czar, but not a sobriety czar. It’s as though our government is run by a group of old-fashioned father figures who rarely spend any time at home, but then love to come into the house and start giving orders. The kids look at him like he’s crazy.

Our drug war should be replaced by a national sobriety campaign. And that means a whole lot more than just saying no; it means saying yes to some things that America, deep in its heart, has not yet decided it wants to say yes to.

The only way America is going to solve its drug problem is if we retrieve our spiritual awareness. That is what sobriety is. There is a magic within each of us that we consistently deny, because it lies in the realm of the imagination. We have been trained since childhood to view the imagination as a less important function than the intellect. This has left us emotionally and spiritually bereft. Taking drugs is a desperate effort to compensate for the loss.

The most dangerous thing in the world for a free society is for a critical mass of people to lose conscious contact with the place within us that says, “Hey, something’s fishy here. I feel something rotten in my gut.” We need to see more clearly some of the terrible things happening in our world today. Not everything that is happening in America today would make a person who is in his or her right mind happy: that’s why we have to be in our right minds. Our right minds are our salvation.

THERE IS SOMETHING about having a child that makes a woman feel she’s a member of the universal “Mommy’s Club.” Once I had a child of my own, all children became so much more important to me.

I know that the mothers of America care about the state of our nation’s children. Yet we are so oddly quiet, so sadly co-opted by the forces that threaten them. Even female hyenas encircle their children, making sure that the adult males cannot feed until the cubs have had a chance to. Surely the women of America can do better than the hyenas.

The true mother archetype is not just soft; she is fierce. And this feminine archetype is making a dramatic new appearance in modern consciousness. She opens a psychic curtain to reveal a radically different worldview than our own, where the female is freed from age-old prejudice and expresses her total nature without fear.”

Part of her total nature is to protect her children at all costs. It is unnatural the way American women are acquiescing to the assaults on America’s children today. As animals protect their feeding offspring, should we not protect our own? Today’s food and air supply is increasingly placed at risk from all manner of carcinogenic content, while American women are still too uninformed, or too distracted, to cry “foul” in any meaningful way. From genetically modified foods to carcinogens in pesticides, to gutted environmental regulations, it remains to be seen whether the women of America are going to say “Enough is enough” in time.”

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS, primarily working at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, have slowed down progress in an area of vital importance to the health and well-being of millions of American citizens. While they represent a tiny fraction of the scientific community, unfortunately they continue to be represented in government by huge financial and political forces.

Climate change denial is moving irretrievably into the dustbin of history’s worst ideas. American citizens—if not yet the majority of politicians currently in power—are ready to embark upon a massive effort to combat the effects not only of catastrophic weather conditions, but also the effects of climate change denial on our environmental and political policies.

The American people are being vastly underserved, both by America’s rejection of the Paris Climate Accord and by the appointment of a climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency, created by Republican President Richard Nixon and with a legacy of forward-thinking environmental policy, has now become an agent of protection not of the earth and the earth’s resources, but of the corporate profits of fossil fuel, chemical, and big agricultural companies. From our land to our water to our air to our food, our most precious treasures do not just lack protection; they are currently under assault.

Environmental justice does not just mean justice for the earth; it also means justice for the people who live on the earth. Gutting the Clean Air Act—as has recently been done—does not just affect the air; it affects our breathing. Gutting the Clean Water Act—as has recently been done—does not just affect the water; it affects our bodies when we drink it. As protectors of our earth, and protectors of our own bodies, we should vigorously and passionately defend the health of our environment against the ill-advised, dangerously recalcitrant policies of the current leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the political forces that leadership represents. Whether or not Mr. Pruitt is still the head of the EPA as of this book’s publication, the challenge remains. We should not stand idly by while millions of Americans suffer the effects of weather catastrophes, when the majority of scientists both in America and throughout the world have established beyond a reasonable doubt that these conditions are exacerbated by human behavior.

Genetically modified food and dangerous pesticides pose additional dangers as well. A well-known case in point is that after meeting with Dow Chemical lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt reversed President Obama’s previous ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which EPA scientists had declared unsafe under any circumstances due to known harm to children’s brains. Under Pruitt’s direction, advocating for your health and mine, as well as the health of our children and our planet, has become secondary to advocating for the financial interests of American business.

America should always be on the side of progress—human progress—and when our politicians are not, then it is up to the people to correct that. We should reject the criminal negligence of those who for financial purposes now wage a dangerous assault upon our environment, and stand in full alliance with those who see the protection of our environment, and the combating of climate change, as a sacred responsibility to ourselves, our children and our children’s children.

YANG, OR EXTERNALIZED activism, has defined politics in the age now passing; yin, or internalized activism, will be a political force in the age now dawning. Soul force emanates subtle energies that invisibly move and heal the world. Soul force is the essence of a new politics because it consists of the social energies released when a sleeping population awakens. Democracy cannot survive masses of people who either do not care what happens, are not looking at what happens, or do not act on what they feel about what is happening. We can have a nap or we can have freedom. We cannot have both. And millions of people realize that now.

Too much shopping is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Too much social media is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Immoderate drug and alcohol use is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. Too much petty conversation is a way we lull ourselves to sleep. But in our hearts, we don’t want to sleep; we want to awaken to our better selves. And our better selves are on this earth with a purpose. Somewhere in our souls we know this. Somewhere in our souls we want this. And somewhere in our souls we are looking for a way to break through to the place where we are fully alive.

Women have a special connection to inner worlds, though that connection has been violently torn asunder for centuries. During the Middle Ages, every feudal village in Europe had a group of women called witches—literally meaning “wise women.” They were the herbalists, midwives, and healers of their world. They facilitated community rituals, which held the inhabitants of a village in sacred connection to nature, each other, and themselves. They held a space, as it were, for the individual’s sense of personal connection to the divine. Some of them were called hags. The word “hag” originally meant “mature woman who carries sacred knowledge.

The witch burnings of the Middle Ages were a systematic effort by the early Church to eradicate the passionate, freethinking woman. Why? Because such women tended to raise passionate, freethinking children. And such children tended to become passionate, freethinking adults. Passionate, freethinking adults are very difficult to manipulate and almost impossible to control. Any time a group or institution seeks to gain control over human minds, one of its first attacks is on passionate women.

What do witch trials have to do with modern America? A lot. There is in modern Western women a cellular memory of burning at the stake, just as there is in modern American blacks a cellular memory of slavery. Many women are still afraid to speak their piece, and there are those who feel it the most natural thing in the world to burn us when we do. But obviously that is changing. From the Women’s March in 2017 to the #metoo movement against sexual harassment, women are beginning to awaken in a whole new way. Gandhi once said, “If I could awaken the women of Asia, I could free India in a day.” The same could be said about America.

WHAT DO SO many of us wish to bring back to civilized awareness in a more potent, alive way? Mystery, intuition, ritual, relationship, healing, emotion, soul, community, imagination. Important parts of who we all are. The stuff of magic and magical people.

The people who never dropped those things from the forefront of their consciousness are the people who have lived at the margins of power in Western civilization during the era now drawing to a close. They have been suppressed at the deepest level, not because the prevailing patriarchal consciousness thought that they were less than. They were repressed because, unconsciously, it was suspected that they were more than. All people have mystical power underutilized in the last hundred years, but it is people who have been historically held down, whose inner strengths have been simmering within the pressure cooker of their profound long suffering, who now stand at the forefront of humanity’s rebirth.

The following stanza from G. K. Chesterton’s poem “The Secret People” is one of my favorite expressions of how the magic of the soul has been shoved aside in the consciousness of the modern world:

They have given us into the hand of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling paper; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

The magic people—of both sexes and all races—haven’t been invited to attend the party in America, for fear that they might dance. They haven’t been invited to speak at the party, for fear that they might sing. They haven’t been invited to run the party, for fear that they might change it.

They would have, and now they’re going to. They are the spirit of a new America, and a key to the revitalization of our democracy.

There has always been a divine plan for the destiny of this nation. Something of indescribable power and light is brewing among us now. It will take us back to the path of the heart, and love will lead us on from there.

Chapter 7 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance

In the Middle Ages, people believed that their lives were affected by “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” With the advent of the Renaissance and then the scientific revolution, people gave up such folly. But was it folly, really? Is our modern way of describing emotions in terms of love and fear really any different than our ancestors’ describing them in terms of good and bad spirits?

There are eternal patterns in history, both personal and collective. Our histories unfold according to a universal rhythm: thesis meets antithesis, creating new synthesis. Everything in life impels its own opposition and the opposing forces then birth something new.

And thus we grow, as truth expresses itself in an ever-unfolding revelation of how life operates. Yes, Renaissance thinking freed the Western mind from the overmystification of the Middle Ages. But no, the scientific revolution was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, there are objective, discernible laws of the physical universe, but yes, there are also mysterious, unexplainable phenomena that mechanistic thinking cannot grasp. The cutting edges of science now support some ancient spiritual traditions.

Which takes us back to “good spirits” and “bad spirits.” No, we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore, but neither did “bad spirits” go away just because we stopped believing in them. “Bad spirits” are fear-based thought forms, and they are not merely personal. They are collective as well. In fact, because on a spiritual level all minds are joined, all thought forms are on some level collective. As we have discussed before, mere external remedy does not ultimately solve a problem, unless the root thinking that produced the problem is transformed within the mind. As long as anyone still holds a racist thought, slavery still has legs. As long as anyone still feels that one group of people is more entitled than any other, then war will not be over. As long as anyone thinks that someone else’s being empowered disempowers them, then injustice will not disappear from the earth.

For instance, historians now believe that during the Middle Ages, somewhere between 800,000 and 9 million people were burned at the stake, 85 percent of whom were women. While we no longer burn witches, we have still not completely routed out of the Western mind the suspicion that there is something dangerous about female power. On a psychic level, powerful women are still burning. We’ve merely changed the consonant from “w” to “b.”

Fear-based archetypes live beyond time or place, inhabiting the eternal regions of the subconscious mind. Scientific or social or political progress can temporarily render them ineffective, but cannot rout them out. Thoughts of fear merely mutate when chased, taking different forms in different times and places. Reason cannot exorcise what is essentially a spiritual darkness. Fear grows like an uncontrollable fungus on the soulless layers of the modern mind, leaving us with an insatiable appetite for a stew of externals that cannot feed us. Traditional therapy cannot assuage the spiritual malaise of the times in which we live. It is a spiritual, not a psychological disease, that threatens to destroy us. In the words of Carl Jung, “Only spirit can cure spirit.”

Our disease is not that 9 million people on this earth die of hunger and hunger-related illnesses each year, while there is no fundamental dearth of food on the planet; our disease is that we are willing to tolerate it. Our disease is not that millions of American children are living lives of hardship and despair as deep as that of any Third World country, while politicians appear on political talk shows every night and don’t feel the need to mention it; our disease is that they can get away with this. Our disease is not that while the United States is the richest nation in the world, we give away only 1 percent in humanitarian aid to nations less fortunate than we; our disease is that any politician suggesting we be more charitable might risk losing his or her election!

Only a spiritual awakening can heal us. Our national conscience is impacted now, held as in a cave, waiting for resurrection and release. “Bad spirits” are floating around us, old archetypes that appear and reappear throughout human history, mocking and destroying the most evolved human dreams.

Spirits” inhabit bodies. As Lincoln said, it is the “angels of our better natures” that we must choose to allow to direct our lives—and there are the good and the bad, the loving and the fearful, in all of us. That should apply to politics as much as to anything else, because karma works collectively as well as individually. What goes around comes around for a country, too. And while on the material level what we give away we no longer have, on a spiritual level only what we give away do we get to keep. Spiritual Law will always, in time, supersede material law.

And what we attack in others we merely fortify in ourselves. That is because, at the deepest level, we are each other.

So what are we to do when we see “bad spirits” taking shape in our world? How do we react when we see a fear-based politics threatening to destroy us all? How do we react to oppressive systems?

First, we begin with the power of awareness. Agape love is brotherly love, in which we reject the deeds of the oppressor without rejecting the oppressor himself. What you hate, you can’t get rid of. The warden is asbound to the prison as the prisoner.

Second, we must commit not to participate in injustice and oppression—even if it is turned into law, by the way, and even though there is usually some candy thrown our way if we do participate.

Third, we must ask God to remove the thoughts of fear and guilt from our own minds, for we live in a holographic universe and if it’s out there, then it’s in here, and if it’s in here, then it’s out there.

Fourth, it behooves us to pray for the oppressor—whoever he or she is—for as we know, the oppressor is merely showing us to ourselves. All of us have elements of fear as well as love within us, and seeing fear only outside ourselves means we’re failing to do the nonviolent work that alone can heal the world.

WE’VE ALL HEARD the expression “the spirit of democracy.” It’s a cliché, but it’s also a very real thing. It is a force of consciousness, a love of liberty, and an embrace of the notion that there is a brilliant goodness in all of us that deserves to come forth and creates a veritable garden of the world when it does.

And is there a spirit that is “undemocratic”? Yes. It is fear’s response to the very notion of the equality of souls. Love brings up everything unlike itself, and democracy has always called forth that which would destroy it. This is why those who love democracy, who benefit from its gifts, must always be vigilant on its behalf. Antidemocratic efforts take many forms, but they are always marked by injustice perpetrated by one group of people toward another.

In Europe’s ancien régime, the aristocracy was quite aboveboard about who and what it was. Today, one of the most virulent antidemocracy, aristocratic forces does not announce itself as such, or even necessarily see itself that way. It is an economic worldview that now threatens to dominate the peoples of the world, even the so-called free governments of the world.

In 2017, of the top 100 economies in the world thirty-one are nations and sixty-nine are corporations. Today, these corporations are literally more powerful than governments. An ugly behind-the-scenes drama, to which the United States is not immune, is that of free, sovereign nations succumbing to what is in effect the power of a corporate colonialization process. The world’s most powerful economic institutions push treaties by which nations and communities are prohibited from passing laws that would weaken the hold of global capitalism in that country. Nation after nation is going down, lured by the illusion of economic security sold to unsuspecting citizens. We are giving in to a corporate dominance that would culturally homogenize the world, suppress the vast majority of its citizens, and run rampant over our natural resources. International financial institutions carry a mandate backed by the power of the strongest nations in the world, particularly the United States: eliminate all barriers to the free international movement of goods and capital, ensuring the right to such movement even against the will of democratic governments and the people to which they are accountable. This effectively makes a mockery of democracy. Can you imagine a treaty that says to a nation that it cannot pass this or “that law if it makes it harder for a large corporation to make money in that country? What difference does it make who our leaders are, or how much they put the good of their citizens before the good of transnational corporate entities, if those entities have become more powerful than governments?

IN AMERICA TODAY, free-market capitalism cannot legitimately claim that where more money is produced for a corporate entity, life by definition is made better for everyone. If the cost of doing business is ecological distress that threatens the welfare of people and planet, if American workers continue to lose social and economic ground in the unraveling of the social contract between management and labor, if executive compensation packages continue to eat the lion’s share of this country’s profits, if money continues to rule Washington and turn the American government into little more than a handmaiden to corporate donors, then democracy will be sacrificed. Our almost tragic deference to the needs of the free-market capitalist economy goes even against the philosophy of Adam Smith, who proclaimed that the free market cannot exist outside an ethical context. Part of what makes capitalism a reasonable economic system is that it allows people freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility. Capitalism itself is morally neutral, but capitalists should not be. Every free market enterprise should be backed by human beings asking this question: “Does what I am about to do serve only the short-term financial good of economic shareholders or does it serve a long-term social good for other stakeholders as well—employees, community, and environment?

The issue of whether American capitalism is willing to course-correct its radical swerve away from an ethical center is the overriding political question of our day. It is a political and not just an economic question, because in what is today’s system of legalized bribery called American politics, how corporations go is how we go. Ethics will not return to either politics or capitalism until ethics are returned to both.

If we decide that improving the life of the average American is more important than consolidating more power in the hands of a corporate elite, then we had better go back into politics, with all our intelligence and all our heart. For a corporate colonialism is running rampant over this planet. In the absence of campaign finance reform—hopefully with public funding for federal campaigns and at the very least a way to override the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision—both major political parties are beholden to the undue influence of money.

One of the things that has impacted me most over the last few years is how many elected officials, when they hear complaints about the kinds of things I am discussing here, can only say, “I know, I know,” with the same fear and frustration as so many of us feel. It makes you wonder who’s really running the country, when the people holding all that so-called power are feeling as disempowered as the rest of us.

Our hope lies in a massive, nonviolent citizen revolution coming up from the streets, including local as well as national politics, growing in various communities, open to new ideas, calling on all the powers of the soul, pressing forward despite the spin and veritable shadow dance of current corporate influence, not only over so much of what we do but over even what we think.

CORPORATE INTERESTS—NOT THE people of the United States—for all intents and purposes now own America.

Moneyed interests control the political process, routinely pouring so many millions of dollars into so many political campaigns as to have completely corrupted the process. This is not a secret anymore. The health and well-being of corporate structures are placed before the health and well-being of individuals and communities, no matter how many people are trapped in poverty by the process; no matter how much the preferred corporate policies widen the already alarming gap between rich and poor; no matter how much human havoc is wreaked among working people whose livelihoods are threatened by corporate restructuring and downsizing; no matter how many more known carcinogens are poured into our ground, our air, and our food; and no matter how many young people are sent to decrepit schools that cannot even afford textbooks, where teaching becomes by definition more crowd control than education, in communities where real chances for young people making it in the world get smaller and smaller every day.

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; huge and profitable companies lay off thousands of employees for no other reason than to increase their short-term stock prices and their already outrageous executive compensation packages; Congress grants huge subsidies and tax breaks amounting to billions of dollars in corporate welfare—and the life and safety of the average American are increasingly crushed underneath it all. Yet the corporatists have the nerve to say the poor are too “entitled”?

Gargantuan economic concerns, whose financial interests are unabashedly placed ahead of the collective good, pour through the halls of our government like lava. We do not spend billions upon billions of dollars more to support certain industries than to support our children for any other reason than that organized business interests can afford highly paid lobbyists to make it happen, in both legal and illegal ways. The influence of money on the political process is a fast-growing cancer threatening to destroy our democracy. It grows in small ways and big ways, every day of every year.

CORPORATIONS IN AND of themselves are not the problem, but only their undue and at times unethical influence on our political system. We don’t want to turn off the system. There is nothing beautiful about what happens in a society when money stops circulating. Our challenge is not to destroy capitalism but to transform its dominant ethos; not to childishly and blindly demonize the corporation but to make a case for the importance—and ultimate benefit to all—of conscience within it.

The free market has been good to me, and I know a bit about its upside; I celebrate my economic freedom as much as anyone. But there is no amount of money I can make that would protect my child from the explosion of horror that will occur in this country if we do not commit to a serious effort at universal access to the opportunities a free market affords.

As a child I was fed, stimulated culturally, safe in my environment, and cared for medically. I was told I was valuable by the world around me—psychologically as well as materially, I had a reasonable chance of success. And it was not just my parents, or our religious community, that gave me those things. This was a larger culture of which I was a part, believing in me and supporting me in myriad ways both large and small: in short, I was set up to succeed. If you make it into the club in America, there is no other country like it. But our problem today is that not enough people can make it into the club. Millions of American children today are absolutely set up to fail. It’s one thing to say that everyone has to climb the ladder of success by him or herself; it’s another thing entirely to make the bottom rung too high for a child to reach, and then condemn him when he can’t climb from there! That is what is happening to millions of children in America, each and every day.

Children cannot provide their own health care; children cannot be responsible for their own education; children cannot create their own cultural stimulation before someone teaches them how. To provide those things to all of America’s children is our responsibility as a society dedicated to self-governance. What we are doing today, as evidenced by so many undereducated, undercared for, throw-away children, is abdicating our moral responsibility to the development of millions of American lives, and then acting horrified when they turn to dysfunctional behavior. In addition, too often the dysfunction that results from their suffering becomes fodder for the profit-making machinery of the prison-industrial complex.

We need to do more than rally to serve all America’s under-privileged citizens; we need to ask ourselves what is wrong in our society—including our public policies—that there are so many people living in desperate conditions to begin with.

In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson sought to break the financial chokehold that he thought the Bank of the U.S. had over American life. His words make sense today:

It is to be regretted that the rich and the powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist . . . but when the law undertakes to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions . . . exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the more potent more powerful, the humble members of society . . . have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. . . . [W]e can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many. . . .

We hear many people say today that poverty is a “charity” issue, and that the government should not be involved in charity. According to that line of thinking, it should be the purview of nonprofits, churches, and so on, to support America’s disadvantaged citizens. But as someone who has founded nonprofits, who understands the importance of charity work, and has led a religious congregation, I know very well that charity cannot compensate for lack of social justice. When I look at the advantages of my own child compared to the relative disadvantages of children a few miles away, I don’t just think that I should be involved in charity work. I think that child on the other side of town is being denied his or her rights in a democratic society, and I fear for my own grandchildren, years from now, if I and my fellow citizens don’t stem the tide of growing economic injustice in this country.

Pointing out the economic inequities in our midst is viewed by some as incendiary talk, often labeled as fostering “class warfare.” But in reality, class warfare in this country is what already has been and is being waged against the middle-class and poor among us, and the prevailing system feels it has the upper hand in that war because our prison system is large enough to handle the expressions of rage that inevitably arise among our most disadvantaged citizens.

Hungry kids don’t learn, and hungry adults can’t hold down a job. Moreover, the hungry among us exist. They are not figments of anyone’s imagination. According to the USDA, 42.2 million Americans faced hunger in 2015. According to the NGO Feeding America, 13.1 million of our children and 5.4 million of our seniors live in food-insecure households. What is going on in our psyches that we are conducting our national business as though this elephant in our living room does not exist?

Over the last few decades, economic opportunity has been systematically drawn upwards, and now the smallest portion of our citizens control the majority of our wealth. With economic opportunity moving upward all the time, the middle class becomes crushed: the greatest fear admitted by most Americans today is job insecurity. And how does the collective ego respond to wealth inequality? What does the power elite say to those now crushed from above? That the problem is those right below you—those who are actually being crushed even more!

There is too much needless suffering in our midst, forming a pressure cooker right beneath us. Nothing is more dangerous to social stability than a large population of desperate people, and that is what America has. A myriad of social “dysfunctions emerge from poverty, endangering our entire society. What family can function well with the specter of economic catastrophe always haunting them? And who among us will function well in the future, if we continue to ignore this ignobility in our midst?

“I WAS SITTING having brunch with a friend at a trendy location in Los Angeles. A famous model had just walked by.

It’s not enough to just give money to the poor, Marianne,” said my friend, sipping his mimosa. “The poor are going to have to change their attitudes.”

I asked him who he thought had a better chance at a positive attitude today: the people having brunch in this beautiful restaurant, or people about ten miles away on the other side of town. Bobby Kennedy used to say that until you have spent one full day in the neighborhood of the inner-city poor in our society, you have no right to condemn them or judge them.

The poor is who my grandfather was; was yours? The immigrant is who my grandparents were; were yours? The desperate are who I once was; were you?

New paradigm thinking, relevant to all human endeavors, posits the interconnectedness of all people. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” This is not just an economic, social, or emotional truth; it is a spiritual, or ultimate, truth and thus will always be reflected across the board in human affairs.

No one can win at the expense of another and long retain his or her advantage. If we severely oppress people economically, they will act out their desperation in ways that ultimately endanger all of us. Harsher prison sentences and other tightened screws will hardly set us free.

The average American, for obvious reasons, has not recently driven through the streets of our most devastated communities. With their jobless rates three to four times the national average, the millions of residents of America’s urban wastelands are caught in a culture of vicious poverty as deep as that of a Third World country. And many of our rural communities are not faring much better.

When someone in America now says the economy is doing well, we should ask ourselves, “Well for whom?” The inner-city poor in America have lived for decades with social and economic conditions as bad as those endured during the worst days of the Depression. The Depression lasted for ten years maximum, and was considered a national catastrophe. It would have been inconceivable for Americans, or the American government at that time, not to try to alleviate the suffering of those whose lives were wrecked by the Great Depression. President Roosevelt created jobs through the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. President Eisenhower would later help rebuild the economy of the rural South through the Economic Development Administration, creating jobs by constructing the highway system that still runs through that region. To aggressively seek to rebuild the economy of a devastated segment of America hardly runs counter to our traditions; what runs counter to our traditions is the way that, today, we do not help. Today, we act like giving a tax cut to the rich is the best way to help the poor. With no economic evidence to back up this outrageous claim, those who foster it promote it nevertheless.

Why should there not be a Marshall Plan for America’s inner cities? It has been more than half a century since America had a massive repair of its infrastructure. Our schools, parks, libraries, and highways all need a major overhaul. The whole country would benefit from a massive job-training and job-creation program for America’s citizens who need them. What we lack is the political will to do it.

The pain of millions of Americans now stuck in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness can only result in greater social dysfunction, such as family rupture, drugs, and crime. More prisons and tougher welfare laws will of themselves do nothing but spray gasoline on the already raging fire. Hatred does not end hatred, and fear does not end fear.

A return to economic and social justice requires exertion of our national will. A massive focus on the economic revitalization of our more devastated communities is, while not yet politically popular, morally correct. Some would say, “Well, they can get a job at McDonald’s, if they want it,” but it does not substitute for providing a fair means to move beyond that job for those willing to exert the effort. Jobs such as those at fast-food restaurants used to mainly belong to students working odd jobs, while today they are the backbone—sometimes two or three such jobs at once—for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, politicians get to brag about lower unemployment rates! That’s like Yertle the Turtle saying that all the turtles beneath him had purpose in their lives. Millions of people having to work two to three minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet is not the sign of a morally, spiritually, or economically healthy society. People need more than jobs; they need the opportunity to get a good job. That is what job training and mass transit provide, and child care makes more possible. Underemployment is a crisis in America for millions of people. Child care is a crisis in America for millions of people. It is very important not to let lower unemployment figures obscure the reality.

A conscience-based politics cares less for political expediency than for moral truth. We should extend our hands to the struggling portions of our nation for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do. Why would we bail out another country, but not our fellow Americans? And why would we not want to help those in trouble, if we ourselves are in our right minds?

Some propaganda, of course, is that such ideas would create a “nanny state,” a culture of dependence rather than aspiration. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The nannying being done now is by the U.S. government, taking such care to make sure that the richest among us are tucked comfortably into bed each night, dreaming of more stock options and a second or third $18 million penthouse. I have never seen more aspiration than I have among those who would love nothing more than to get in the game. Who want to work. Who want to create. Who want to produce. And if they had had a better education, or health insurance, or weren’t burdened by all those college loans, then they would! An economy that works only for the few at the top does not necessarily create happy people; but an economy that seeks to foster happy people by removing the material shackles that bind them would explode with creativity and possibility for all.

As usual, we could do the right thing and watch what happens.

ACCORDING TO THOMAS Jefferson, all Americans were to have universal access to the opportunity to produce modest material abundance. Not every rich person is greedy—not by a long shot—any more than every poor person is kind and noble. Indeed, many of the richest Americans are becoming alarmed at the increasing economic disparities in America, for they do not bode well for any of us. If this boat sinks, we’re all going down. It will do us little good to be wealthy if we have to live in gated communities and in fear for our very lives. That is what will happen in America if the emotional violence already spawned by economic injustice continues to spill over into more widespread and collective expressions of outrage.

After World War I, the European Allies made a terrible mistake. Punishment of the vanquished Germans was cruel and unrelenting. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson passionately argued against the punishing attitude of our European Allies, predicting exactly what occurred: that an economically and socially crushed Germany would be prey to something even more dangerous in the years ahead.

It is generally agreed by historians that if Germany had not been in such a desperate state in the years following World War I, Hitler would not have had such an easy rise to power. That is why we treated Germany and Japan so differently after World War II: we helped rebuild their economies, realizing finally that there is no greater threat to peace and security in the world than a large group of crushed and desperate people.

We have to rethink money and its place in our lives if we are to transform American society. But the solution to economic injustice does not lie in making money bad. Spiritually, there is only one of us here; in the final analysis, there are no separate needs. We do not have to choose between the rich and the poor, but only between a consciousness of abundance and a consciousness of lack.

The primary political issue should not be the distribution of wealth but the creation of wealth. That is why job training, job creation, and education matter so much. The creation of wealth should be validated, not undermined; but it must be validated for all American citizens. It is not a limited amount of wealth, but a limited amount of creative, compassionate thinking that is our problem now. There is not a limited amount of potential prosperity in America, because there is not a limit to human creativity. In the presence of love, integrity, discipline, and the commitment to excellence, limits fade away. We must push back against the notion that conscience has no place in politics, and unapologetically proclaim that, in the long run, a little more love would create a lot more money.

President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, “The free society that does not take care of its many who are poor will not be able to save its few who are rich.

CHANGE DOES NOT come from the top down, but from the bottom up. Each of us can help transform the financial ethos of the United States.

As individuals, and as a nation, we need to carefully watch our economic choices. They are powerful expressions of our values. Every time a screenwriter says, “No, I won’t write a script in which the woman gets cut up into little pieces and the restaurant full of people gets blown up by a sixteen-year-old blonde bombshell carrying an AK-47, even if you do pay me $500,000,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lawyer says, “I won’t let you buy my services so you can find a way to legally exploit old and feeble people out of their life savings,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a business executive says, “I don’t want to spend this meeting only asking ourselves how much money we’re going to make this quarter; let’s also ask how much good we’re going to do for the country and the world,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a lumber company executive says, “I don’t care how much money we would get from cutting down those trees—we’ve only got four percent of our virgin forests left in this country as it is, and I don’t want to steal from my grandkids anymore,” conscience takes an economic stand. Any time a Congressman says, “No, I won’t vote to take money away from summer job programs for inner-city youths and then vote for further subsidies for wealthy businesses that don’t need it,” conscience takes an economic stand. And any time we lobby our Congressional representatives against a tax bill that squeezes money from the middle and lower classes to give more money to the rich, conscience takes an economic stand.

A true marriage of conscience and economics will not depress the U.S. economy; it will rebuild it from within, revitalizing it in a way no external economic machinations could do. The greatest unmined source of wealth in America is the potential peace and happiness of millions of now stressed-out Americans. And the greatest unmined source of energy in America is the unmined genius of every undereducated and poorly educated child. When we as a nation return to our natural goodness and common sense, money will flow more easily for all of us. I heard a story once about a man who had some fishes and loaves. He told us to give to the poor. He always took care of the children. And he gave the money-changers a piece of his mind.

Chapter 6 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

Chapter 4: An American Awakening

CHAPTER 4
AN AMERICAN AWAKENING

Most people I know who are interested in the word “healing” do not particularly like the word “politics.” “Healing” implies to them something loving, organic, and soulful; while “politics” implies something fear based, power addicted, and brutish.

For years we have been pouring our most creative thinking into the building of new paradigm models—in education, health, business, relationships. Yet politics has seemed so dirty, we haven’t even wanted to deal with the subject. Now that is changing, if for no other reason than we see where that has gotten us. Even if we don’t perceive politics as the most powerful vehicle for positive change—and from a spiritual perspective, it clearly isn’t—who can deny how destructive it can be when dominated by the thoughts of fear and hate?

The problem is not politics, per se, but rather an evil we sense lurking in its house. It is not one person, or one group, that is the source of our political travails today. It is a consciousness that has burrowed its way into the “sinews of our civilization. Evil wears a business suit in the world today, hiding behind pinstripes, smiling away. Our biggest problem is not a person or an institution, but a worldview that threatens to destroy all things. It is a sensibility—a sleazy, seductive way of seeing the world—that has no human conscience nor concern for the future. The enemy, of course, is America’s false god, our new bottom line, our economic obsessiveness. It is literally beastly, as it would gobble up our children, our planet, our freedom itself, to satisfy its appetite for endless control. While it clearly has a stronghold in American politics, its goal is to dominate the world.

This problem has become like an inoperable, hidden cancer—always lurking behind this or that, a spider tumor whose root inside you seems impossible to rout out. It is a cancer underlying all our cancers; it is systemic, and cannot be treated effectively through any traditional means. Even before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate money unduly influencing our politics with the Citizens United decision, our cultural ethos had become corrupted by an acceptance, even an exaltation, of greed.

There is no one to be angry at, for we are all conspirators in one way or the other. Even if we did not participate actively in the politics of the last few decades, the choice to not participate was participation in and of itself. And now it will take more than traditional politics alone to right the American ship. The only way to transform the political dysfunction in our midst is to collectively rise above it—not by ignoring politics, but by changing our relationship to it. There is no silver bullet for this problem, nor pat political solution. It is not a medicine we need, but a healing process. The problem is an opportunistic infection that would not have occurred had the citizenry of the United States not given up its social immune system function in the American body politic.

Yet how do we create a new politics—a force field of citizens engaged enough to repudiate the spectral threat in our midst—particularly at a time when the old one is so smugly sure of itself, so bolstered by gargantuan material power? The answer is, with spiritual perspicacity. We don’t have to worry about what’s happening now; the heart“less fall of their own dead weight. Our economic and political status quo will pass into oblivion, as it represents a state of spiritual sleep. Our task is not to fight it; our task is to ourselves wake up.”

THE MOST CRITICAL metapolitical issue in America today is the numbing and suppression of personal power within the individual American. Political power ultimately derives from the personal confidence and courage to express oneself. Where a social system has failed to adequately educate its citizens, bombarded our nervous systems with an overstimulation of mindless entertainment, promoted consumerism as the primary social activity, and accepted the numbing of the resultant pain with massive use of antidepressants as a substitute for questioning the pain itself, personal power becomes the purview of a lucky or courageous few. The game of the culture has been to respond to our feelings of disempowerment by exploiting those very feelings—trying to convince us that if we buy this or that product, or elect this or that official, our feelings of well-being will be miraculously restored.

Americans as individuals tend to be spunky and eminently decent. We are great to sit next to on airplanes. As a group, however, we have a capacity for denial and grandiosity that makes us increasingly easy targets for manipulation by political propaganda. We have become completely taken in by a dangerous brew of public relations genius, limitless campaign spending, and forces of corporate greed.

Much of our education was training in passive acceptance of someone else’s perspective, or mindless facts, rather than the development of an ability to think deeply for ourselves; the ubiquitous assault of popular culture has impacted our capacity for critical thinking; our linear thought processes are jumbled by too much exposure to electronics; and we are left with a dangerous propensity to be taken for a ride by anyone who can afford a specialist at scrambling our brains even more.

We have been lulled to sleep by an official culture that speaks nonsense to us as though it were reasonable, and have been trained by a consumer culture since childhood to conspire in our own psychological bondage. The lulabies are compelling, but waking up is better.

As we meditate and pray, we begin to awaken. As we read good books, we begin to awaken. As we forgive, we begin to awaken. As we deepen our relationships, we begin to awaken. As we eschew mindless social media, we begin to awaken. As we serve our community, we begin to awaken. As we journey toward psychological health, we begin to awaken. As we think for ourselves, we begin to awaken. As we communicate more courageously, we begin to awaken. As we take up the philosophical mantle of concern for the future of life on earth and apply it as best we can to our social, professional, and political endeavors, we begin to awaken both ourselves and others. And in that awakening lies hope for all of us. Mass awakening from our entrenched delusions is the only hope for America’s healing.

IT’S NOT AN accident that Americans have become so passive in the face of systemic threats to our freedom. For decades, the American public education system tried to teach children what to think, avoiding its greater mission in a free society: to teach children how to think. Teaching children how to think means fostering minds that are questioning, assertive, open-minded, and creative. We should bring up our children to be creators, not imitators, for only that prepares them for the wonder of life.

This is an outlook that the perpetuation of democracy requires, but that an industrialized economic system came more and more to resist. As we became dominated economically by the rule of industrialization, the tacit pact that American education made with industry was to provide the system with masses of Americans who would show up on time, do as they were told, not ask a lot of questions, and not bother to assert themselves.

A child would enter kindergarten excited and passionate. By the sixth grade at the latest, his or her passion was squelched. Passion is messy for an authoritarian system and frightening to those who live under it. In the name of discipline and education, yet actually in the service of an economic system which had become our sacred cow, America taught its children to stuff their passions and forget their questions, and thus turn off their minds.

I’m not a conspiracy buff in the traditional sense. The conspiracy that concerns me is our very way of life, our conspiracy of silence about things that matter most. It’s an invisible foe because it’s the tenor of our collective being. There is no one to oppose because there is no monolithic power source that spews out all the poison of our forgetfulness. We want to forget, after all, because there are a lot of things we don’t even want to know. Direct confrontation, even if we knew all the ins and outs of America’s deepest, darkest secrets, is not an option. What we have got to do is rise above, begin thinking again and feeling again like the passionate, authentic, brilliant human beings we were created to be. From that place we will cast a web of insights and manifestation that will disperse malaise and malice, and bring us back to life. The only way to ultimately counter antidemocratic forces is to foster democratic ones.

It’s interesting to note some of the differences between Americans and Europeans. The average European is much better educated, much more aware of the political and social issues that affect his or her daily life, than is the average American. We have become so accustomed to allowing the media to do our thinking for us—and the media so often has dumbed down our thinking— that we are dangerously ignorant of important matters.

What I’ve noticed, however, working on both continents, is that as intelligent as Europeans are concerning a particular subject, their enthusiasm for action is not always the same as ours. Our political DNA is different: they’re the children of those who stayed in the Old World and changed things where they were, and we’re—with the significant exception of those who were brought here as slaves—the children of those who came to the New World seeking something different. All Americans are inherently change-agents. There is nothing more traditionally American than to make a run for something better.

The American propensity to rise up out of oppressive situations and do what we can to transform them sleeps in us, but has not died. And when we awaken, we awaken big. You give a group of Americans a thumbnail sketch of an issue that demands our involvement, a 101 overview, and we’re jumping up and down on chairs, organizing activity, creating solutions, preparing to act. We leave no doubt that we are indeed the psychological heirs of the men and women who, over two hundred years ago, did what it took to re-create the world. As Thomas Paine proclaimed regarding the American Revolution, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

We need a new American Revolution now, a revolution of consciousness and soul.

This begins with our taking responsibility for the abdication of our citizen authority, particularly its moral and spiritual dimensions. We abdicate our power every time we allow ourselves to surrender to the myriad forms of mind-death that pass for culture in America today. If we want a healing in this country, then we will have to take our minds back.

We need to be more than rich or powerful now. If we want to save our democracy and create a sustainable future for ourselves and our children, we’re going to have to become deep thinkers. We’re going to have to begin functioning on more than just a few cylinders. We’re going to have to evolve beyond the mechanistic perspective that is no more than an attitudinal relic of the twentieth century, and which limits our politics to a dangerously immature view of the world. We’ve forgotten who we are as spiritual beings, and we must remember. We have forgotten, among other things, our identity as source and protector of power in America.

As a consequence, that power is seeping like blood from our wounds and our democracy is withering. No more sleeping, America. It is time to wake up.

OUR FOUNDERS, BY signing the Declaration of Independence, were committing treason against the king of England. If they had failed and were convicted, their punishment would have been the most horrendous death possible. Yet most of us do not show anywhere near their courage or conviction. Rather, our thinking marches right in line with whatever commands the invisible beast hands down. Our biggest fear is the disapproval of his minions.

But there is a secret that every mystical revolutionary should know: The beast has no power whatsoever against the divinely illumined mind. In our hearts and minds lies the power of nonviolence, and that is the power of God alive within us. When harnessed for the collective good, there is no power in the universe that can stand before its might.

Know that, and a revolution in consciousness becomes an effortless accomplishment. The heart-filled mind knows no defeat.

But without the strength of an enlivened mind, we become passive observers to our own lives, easy to sell to and easy to control. Thus, the onset of our national disease: citizen anemia. The American people have been spiritually weakened. We know more about reality television than we know about issues that vitally affect our daily lives.

Why are so many aware of every celebrity who entered rehab over the last five years, but not aware that nineteen American children die of gun violence every day? Why are we alert to every micro-aggression against our feelings on any given day, but not deeply aware of state and federal efforts at voter suppression that threaten our very democracy? The brain is a muscle that must be exercised in order to function well. One is reminded of George Washington’s comment that “Americans have almost amused themselves out of their liberties.” American popular culture is starting to look like an exercise in democracy’s assisted suicide.

American democracy carries with it extraordinary rights to express ourselves. As many threats as now exist to those rights, a larger problem is our willingness to abdicate the power of our own voices. No one is forcing any of us to keep our conversation shallow. Many, in fact, have now begun to recognize the price we’ve paid as a nation because too many of us did. Today, we are hearing the roar of a populace having decided to speak up after years of dysfunctional silence about things that matter most.

Americans are often slow to wake up to what’s happening around us, but once we do we slam it like nobody’s business.

America, in fact, has no dearth of genius. What we could do if we wanted, is nothing short of miraculous. And many are now beginning to see this, awakening from the delusional preoccupation with self to a broader concern for our collective good.

What we lacked over the last few decades is an evolved sense of common purpose for our talent and intelligence. Our awesome creativity was applied to mainly self-centered, ultimately unimportant ends. But that was then, and this is now.

Each of us has within us depths of intelligence and creativity that come forth only in response to meaningful purpose. Many millions of Americans sincerely want to see this country change for the better, and are willing to participate in the effort to make that happen. People are naturally attracted to a sense of higher, common need; just watch any of us when there is a storm coming through town or a fire down the street. We are living through a storm, and we’re going to help each other through this.

It is natural to us, at the deepest level of our being, to love each other. There shouldn’t have to be a disaster to bring us together or to inspire us to serve a higher purpose. Disasters give us social permission to be who we already are. The ancient Greeks used the word “politeia” to mean the involvement of the citizen beyond his or her own self, or even family identity, to the larger community of the nation. Politics should not be a place where we merely compete or even negotiate for who gets what, but rather a place where we creatively work together toward a greater good for all.

Service shouldn’t be something we do separate from our daily lives; it should become a way of life. That, at bottom, is what citizenship is. President Kennedy’s line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” is something that Americans should carry in our hearts, much more than we do the promise of a balanced budget. What we most need, as Americans, is to remember—and then act on the memory—that we were born for something far more important than the attainment of mere self-centered goals. We want to feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Otherwise, no matter what we do or what we achieve, some little voice at the back of our minds will always say, “Is this all there is?”

Ironically, it is a crisis in our democracy—the actual threat to its existence—that has reminded millions of Americans that in fact it matters to us after all.

Like Germany in the early Thirties, Rome before it fell, and France before the Revolution, the United States has been a nation in denial. We routinely danced while those on the other side of town were bleeding. We are not a selfish people; I think the average American hasn’t even been aware of the huge amount of chronic economic despair experienced by so many millions of people over the last few decades. Supported by free trade deals, companies closed their factories in order to increase profits by putting them overseas; societally, we acquiesced to a general sense that short-term financial gain for corporate shareholders mattered more than long-term viability of the entire society, including its workers; and more and more, the U.S. government became a servant to the dictates of the corporate boardroom rather than a protector of the common good. Where else would their political contributions come from?

Tremendous human suffering accrued, as the financial resources of this country were handed over, year after year, in a staggering transfer of wealth from our middle class to the proverbial one percent. Yet for years, a political and media elite were able to make tens of millions of economically desperate people seem almost invisible.

The plight of the economically traumatized in America became a tinderbox just waiting for a match; our political leaders, many of whom had to have been aware that the tinderbox existed, seemed to think that they wouldn’t be reelected if they mentioned it. And boy, were they wrong. A populist revolution has been brewing in our country for years; the only question was whether it would be a progressive or an authoritarian populism that rode it into power.

It is not anger so much as economic despair that fueled the political upheaval we have witnessed since the 2016 election. Both of our major political parties would do well to look deep into their souls in order to discover where they went wrong, and course-correct in order to reclaim their place as true conduits of our national good. Both of them have abdicated their moral vision, that vision having been literally sold to the highest-bidding campaign donor.

MORALITY IS A light with many facets.

Social conservatives tend to concentrate mainly on private morality, whereas social liberals focus more on public morality. To one, someone’s cheating on their partner might be viewed as a serious violation of moral law. To the other, the government’s abandonment of the health and education of millions of disadvantaged children in favor of tax breaks for our wealthiest citizens is an egregious violation of moral law. In fact, in a well-balanced life both personal and collective morality matters.

But a spiritual discussion is not the same as a moral discussion. Moral principles, while not relative in themselves, can be interpreted in many ways. Spiritual principles, on the other hand, are based on objective, discernible laws of consciousness.

The spiritual conversation does not take sides. It merely states the deeper issue, favoring only the enlightenment of the human race. It is a set of principles on which the universe is ordered. Spiritual law is not personal but impersonal, like physical laws. If Hitler strode into the sunlight, then Hitler got sun. If Mother Teresa had walked off a platform, then Mother Teresa would have fallen down. No one gets different treatment by physical laws—or spiritual laws—depending on whether they’re “nice” or not.

The cornerstone of spiritual law is the law of Cause and Effect, or what in the Eastern traditions is called karma. As we know from physics, every action has a reaction. That law is the organizing principle of spirituality. It is the basis for the Golden Rule, which is at the heart of all religious teaching: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, because ultimately they will. Or if they don’t, someone else will. In a way, that’s all you need to know. If everything we do has a consequence, if everything we do comes back to us, then surely we will come in time to learn that it is ultimately in our own best interests to put out only what we would want to get back.

How this applies to politics is interesting. Millions, probably billions of people on earth are aware that the law of Cause and Effect is simply the way things are. But what we have not yet deeply considered—certainly not in the United States—is that this principle holds for collective actions in the same way it holds for individual ones.

If Steve violates the law of love, then Steve is going to have to pay the price. If Steve’s government violates the law of love, then Steve’s nation will have to pay the price. And since Steve lives there, his life will be affected. Steve, at that time, will not be able to appeal to some higher court saying, “But God, I didn’t know what my government was doing!” Particularly not in a society when Steve would have known had Steve been looking, and Steve would have realized had Steve been thinking, and Steve might have made a difference had he exercised his power to do so.

The late legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite once gave a speech in which he said that when Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Germans who lived within miles of the camps rushed to meet Allied soldiers saying, “We didn’t know! We didn’t know what was happening there!” But, said Cronkite, they were still responsible—for they had tolerated the shutting down of a free press in Germany, and once that has occurred, then anything can happen. In many ways, we are accountable not only for what we know but also for what we should have known.

As long as we’re on the subject of Hitler, by the way, it’s a good time in our history to remember that he was democratically elected.

Another plea with the universe that doesn’t always work well is, “My boss made me do it” or, “It was someone else’s decision.” Nazi war criminals were sent to their deaths by the Nuremburg tribunal, which held, like Thoreau, that conscience is a higher law than government. If your government is perpetrating something that violates the higher law of life as you understand it, then it is your responsibility to say so and your responsibility to refuse to participate. Satyagraha was Gandhi’s term for the refusal to participate in unjust systems, and he posited that, over time, the moral authority of such refusal turns into political force.

When it comes to the behavior of national governments and huge multinational conglomerates, it is very easy for the individual to look away. It is very easy to say, “This has nothing to do with me. I can’t make a difference anyway.” But from a metaphysical perspective, it behooves us to remember that the universe never looks away. It registers everything, even to the last detail, and what boomerangs at your nation, boomerangs at you whether you have been looking or not.

Another principle to consider is the ultimate illusion of time. In an individual’s life, it is fairly easy to see that if I am unfair to Dorothy, then Dorothy will probably do something to react to that quite soon. In a small enough context, it is easy to see how karma works. But the size of the context means nothing to the universe. In a nation’s life, particularly one as mighty as our own, military and economic power can bolster the illusion that the cosmic order can somehow be modified—but it cannot. We figure we won’t be punished for transgressions against some small nation in the Third World because our military might is so extraordinary, who would dare retaliate? But whether or not that nation can retaliate is irrelevant. Nature retaliates. All that is relevant is the Law of the universe; what we do will come back to us, and—consider this—if not to us today, then to our children tomorrow. Invade a country you shouldn’t invade, and you help create ISIS. You withhold help from millions of desperate people, and they become more vulnerable to radical propaganda. Examples such as these abound.

Our thoughts, and certainly our behavior, set off forces in the universe. If our thoughts are loving, then love will return to us. If our thoughts are not loving, if our national power rests more on “brute force” than on “soul force,” then fear is what will return to us.

Only when our thoughts are healed will the planet be safe for ourselves and our children. We cannot just treat the symptoms of hate; we must rid the world of hate. And the first place to do that is within our hearts.

President Franklin Roosevelt wrote these words in 1945, for a Jefferson Day address that he died before being able to deliver: “More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Westerners were naïvely hopeful that science and technology could solve all the problems of humanity. Now, over a hundred years later, how painful and poignant is the realization that this is anything but true. The forces of humanly manufactured powers merely follow our command. They can be instruments of hate or instruments of love, instruments of war or instruments of peace, depending on how our minds direct them. But no thoughts are neutral; all minds create at some level. Energy is never static. At this point in history, something either leads to a better world or else leads to one more dangerous. What does not create, on some level, destroys. Every thought is based on either love or fear, and then extends accordingly. We are free to choose what we want to think, but we are not free to escape the forces set in motion by the mental choices we make.

The task before the human race is to become a human family. Nothing less will ensure our safety or even guarantee the survival of our species, at a time when the world has become so small and the stakes have become so high.

The question is, do we, the current generation, have what it takes to live up to the critical challenges of the time in which we live? Are we made of the “right stuff,” psychologically, morally, and in every other way, to stave off the dangers and fortify the security of the civilized world?

Now, at this critical moment, we are in the midst of deciding.

SEVERAL GENERATIONS MAKE up the “adult generation” of any particular time, and understanding how each generation fits into those before it can be helpful.

The boomers are aging, but we’re still here—and politically relevant. We are best understood when seen in terms of the psychological differences between us and our parents, the generation of Americans that fought World War II. This earlier generation surrendered five years of their lives to wage the war, and after that they wanted little more than to lie back on the couch, put their feet up on the coffee table, and drink another beer. God knows they deserved it. And seen from today’s perspective, they were an entire generation undergoing posttraumatic stress. People today can hardly imagine what it would mean to take on the Nazis for five years and not even go to therapy to discuss it.

General Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, and then President of the United States from 1952 until 1960. Eisenhower, with his unique vantage point for viewing the devastating effect of World War II on the generation that fought it, would have had a natural tendency to want to comfort people in the following years, to let them rest from too much strain, to at least unconsciously protect Americans from any further, critical public challenges. And thus the Fifties.

Then, of course, came the baby boom. Millions of us were thus brought up by mentally vacationing parents, and simply because we lived in the house with them we went on vacation, too! The difference between our generation and theirs, though, is that they had earned their vacation—and we did not. They had collectively given of themselves to make the world a better place, which awarded them a badge of honor they well deserve. Boomers never had that initiatory experience.

War initiated the World War II generation into bravery. Vietnam was an unjust war, not the just war that most people consider World War II to have been. And it speaks well of the baby boomer generation, not ill, that we rejected it on moral grounds. History challenged an earlier generation to wage war, and it challenged the next to wage peace. We began to do that, and then we stopped. A different kind of drama came our way.

Had the Sixties not happened, I think the baby boomer generation would have made its mark in the most glorious way. We had the leaders to lead us through the door marked “Glory,” but when they died, we felt the door shut in our faces. Like Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land but not being able to enter it himself, the Kennedys and King took us up to the door but they themselves could not walk through. Opening that door is a job still left unfinished.

For we who thought we would repair the world ended up contributing mightily to the mess. The baby boomer generation mastered the art of “making things better for me,” but has done too little to “make things better for us.”

In many cases, the idealists of yesterday became the compromisers, if not the cynics, of today.

What happened to us then is what happens to every generation: our children were born and their very existence says, “Move over. We have other plans.”

Life is intentional. Generations for whom baby boomers are parents and grandparents are expressing a new audacity of spirit, with rebirth at its characterological core. The older you are the more you know some things, and the younger you are the more you know other things. It is time once again—each generation having learned what it has learned—to reclaim the quintessential American audacity to start new things.

To reinvent, to re-create, to say, “No, we can do better”—these are the forces that gave us birth and will redeem us now. New possibilities for life on earth are once again waiting to be born. And for Americans, this includes a revitalization of our democracy and the values it represents. In this emerging new cycle of our national life, it behooves us to remember we are the United States, not the disunited states. At this point in the life of our country, and the life of the world, we will remember we’re together, or we will surely die apart. That joining, and the sense of community it engenders, is the cornerstone of the new America.

Now, in the twenty-first century, there is a yearning among us to apply our talents to collective ends. Millions go home at night to nice apartments, nice houses, nice furniture, nice electronic equipment, even nice bodies beside them, and yet deep in their hearts say, “God, I’m bored.” We long for a more genuinely passionate life, and for a deeper purpose to living it. We want to throw off the invisible chains of a wealthy slave condition, in which our genius has been co-opted to serve no higher god than mammon, which is no god at all. We want to start a new cycle now. The current America just recycles the old; the new America is truly new.

A time of awakening is truly at hand. We are ready to wake up from a very, very long nap. We are ready to get back to the Great Work of being alive.

Author Barbara Marx Hubbard has said that the greatest poverty of our times is the poverty of those who are not giving their spiritual gifts. “Twenty percent live at base level need, and eighty percent at spiritual need. And if the 80 percent were giving their gifts, the 20 percent wouldn’t be in material poverty.”

Like a new mother who feels physical pressure to give her milk, we feel spiritual pressure to give of what we have to generations coming after us. Nothing short of that is deep enough to satisfy our need. We want to be more than contenders; we want to be contributors to something bigger than ourselves.

JUST AS THERE is a so-called art of waging war, there is also an art of waging peace. “True peace,” said Dr. King, “is not merely the absence of some negative force-tension, confusion, or war; it is the presence of some positive force-justice, good will and brotherhood.

We need to declare peace now, with as much serious effort and intention as that with which a nation declares war. Fear-based thinking is essentially a war mentality, and who among us does not live with fear. Our efforts to be spiritually healed, to find the love that sets us free, is our effort to become not only more peaceful ourselves but also instruments of peace in a war-torn world. Gandhi said, “We must be the change we want to see happen in the world.

Until a critical mass of Americans commits to the establishment of a nonviolent society, violence will continue to plague us. The issue, ultimately, isn’t whether gun manufacturers or the producers of violent media and video games are more responsible for violence among our children. The most important issue is to recognize that both gun manufacturers and violent video manufacturers serve the same false god, and his color is green. While 97 percent of Americans now say they want universal background checks and 67 percent of us says we want to ban the sale of assault weapons, the NRA will continue to advocate for more money for gun manufacturers under the guise of protecting the Second Amendment. Yet blood money is hardly true prosperity. In this as in every other area, as long as short-term economic interests are society’s bottom line, then our children will be underserved. Caring for our children does not always serve society’s short-term economic interest, but it does serve our long-term humanitarian one. We cannot have it both ways, and our pretending otherwise is threatening to destroy us. Ultimately, only a massive change of heart will change our societal direction in a serious way.

Love is more than a feeling; it is a choice, a commitment, a stand we take, or it is nothing. A stand for heart is the essence of the new, nonviolent revolution now brewing in America. We are looking within, where we are finding our true power. And we are committed to expressing our power in meaningful, effective ways.

It is time for us to repudiate America’s culture of violence, not just by blaming others but by taking inventory in our own hearts. Some of us need to surrender our guns, some of us need to surrender our violent games and videos, and some of us need to surrender the unforgiveness we harbor and have harbored in our hearts for years.

Until we, the American people, fundamentally change, nothing is going to be fundamentally different. Our children will continue to kill and be killed. Our depression and anxiety will continue to soar. Our water and air will continue to be poisoned. And our very freedom will become mere memory. The American experiment, in that awful yet no longer impossible scenario, will have failed.

THE FABRIC OF American society can only be rewoven one stitch at a time: one person forgiven, one child read to, one sick person prayed for, one elder given respect and made to feel needed, one prisoner rehabilitated, one mourner given comfort. These actions, when performed sincerely, emanate from spiritual ground that is itself the healing of our problems, as our separation from that ground of being has itself been our primary wound. Like the mythical lost continent of Atlantis, there is a ground now submerged beneath the subconscious waters, visible in ancient times perhaps but not visible now, set to rise again, to reappear. Our initial tenderness, wonderment, and innocence have been suppressed and marginalized by the world we have built—the world of modern “progress.” It is only when we fall in love, marry, give birth, grieve openly, or prepare to die that we dare to show our real face, to shine the light that glows within us. Our failure to be more authentically human is threatening to destroy the world.

In a country where our political right to live creatively is so awesomely assured, there is yet within most of us the feeling that a beautiful instrument is in some way going unplayed. There is a saying in the Jewish prayer book, “Sad is he who does not sing, and when he dies his music dies with him.” Something goes unsung in most Americans today, though there is yet within each of us the urging of an internal conductor, exhorting and preparing us to sing.

While earthly resources are finite, spiritual ones are not. In all of us there is divine potential and the natural propensity to reach for it. In a nation of well over 300 million people, there is a stunning collection of unmined spiritual gold. As we each mature into a deeper understanding of our lives and why we’re living them, that understanding itself becomes the womb of a new America. As each of us awakens to the preciousness of our individual right to make a difference in this world—and the cosmic momentum that will support us when we try—we become a powerful wave of resistance to the forces of fear. It is not just our capacity to say no to what we don’t want that is our power to renew the world around us. It is our deeper power to say yes to our own creative abilities and yes to the light within others, which is the healing balm for the American soul. Each generation brings forth new life, physically and spiritually, or life will have to stop. Each of us might ask ourselves now, “Am I ready to bring forth new life, for myself, for my nation, for my world?”

When enough of us start asking deeper questions, then deeper answers will begin to appear. A seemingly endless war against terrorism now forces us into deeper questioning. The environmental desecration of the planet now forces us into deeper questioning. The election of Donald Trump now forces us into deeper questioning. The difficulty and heartbreak of these questions are forcing us to our knees.

And that is exactly where we need to be.

Chapter 5 will be emailed to you tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

Chapter 3: National Atonement

CHAPTER 3
NATIONAL ATONEMENT

In spiritual terms, the state of the soul is the awakened state, while the mortal personality dwells in perpetual sleep. That is why enlightened masters are often called the “awakened ones.” Great souls—and all of us have a capacity for spiritual greatness when our hearts are open wide—have the ability to see beyond personality to the more spiritually real world than that of practical, worldly concerns.

Behind every human event is a spiritual drama, a deeper movement of the soul toward greater darkness or greater light. With every event, the soul either forgets itself or remembers itself, is either veiled by fear or shining forth in love. The individual life is a soul-drama, and so is the collective life of a nation, an ethnic group, a civilization, and so on.

We have established already that the Founding Principles of the United States were a burst of light for all humanity. They form a system of liberty and justice, both of which are faces of the divine. But we have also eatablished that, from our earliest days, the spiritual light of the United States has at times been eclipsed by the darkness of certain historical forces, many of which our Founders themselves had not outgrown. The march of modern civilization from its most primitive to its most evolved state—from the power of brute force to the power of soul force—is not always a straight but sometimes a jagged line. Two steps forward, one step back, three steps sideways, and so goes history.

The plan of spiritual evolution is marked not only by God’s will that we move ever in the direction of love, but also by another of God’s creative principles: that humanity has free will. What that means is that in any given moment, it is our choice whether we move toward love or retreat from it. What is not love is fear. But in the larger scheme of things, there is a limit past which lovelessness cannot remain. Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees or to our end.

God is all-forgiving. He does not seek to judge and punish us, but to correct and heal us. He is not invested in our guilt but in our innocence. The spiritual principle by which He helps us return to love when we have strayed from its ways is the principle of Atonement.

The Atonement was introduced into human consciousness by God Himself, as a response to our capacity for fear. It is our eternal opportunity to choose again. That is what makes the Atonement a miracle—it is something introduced into the laws of time and space, by a power beyond them both. Grace supersedes the law of karma. To atone is to admit our errors, praying that God free us from what would otherwise be their inevitable consequences. It is a humble return of our minds to God’s love. It is to recognize where we ourselves have taken a path away from God’s will, and ask to be corrected and forgiven and healed. The story of the Prodigal Son makes clear how delighted the father is when the son who strayed returns. By willingly and consciously unburdening ourselves of the weight of our mistakes, we are given the chance to begin again, to go forward in life from a healed perspective.

Could America atone? Could America not use a miracle? The command to atone is a universal spiritual theme. In the Jewish religion, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, where Jews admit our errors of the past year, asking God’s forgiveness and for His willingness to inscribe us in the Book of Life for another year. Catholics are called to confess their sins in regular confession. In Alcoholics Anonymous, “we admit to God, and to ourselves; the exact nature of our wrongs.”

In an individual life, the importance of taking stock of our own sins—as opposed to indulging the ever-present temptation to catalogue someone else’s—is a well-understood spiritual imperative. We cannot heal without it. And what of the life of a nation? Do we have collective sins to atone for as well? Is Atonement part of our national healing?

Abraham Lincoln thought so. In proclaiming a National Day of Fasting and Prayer on March 30, 1863, Lincoln said,

We have been preserved, these many years; in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

He added,

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon. . . .

And what are America’s sins or spiritual errors? Some are open to interpretation, of course, but some are clearly not. There are three main areas where America’s need to atone weighs heavily on our national psyche: our cruel treatment, indeed genocide, of the Native American people; our racism toward African Americans throughout our history; and the terrible mistakes that were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

A GREAT NATION, like a great person, is not one who has never fallen down, but one who has done what it takes to get back up. Once we’re mature enough, we understand that there isn’t one among us who has not made mistakes. The issue is not whether we have erred but, rather, what is God’s attitude toward human errors? What would He have our attitudes be toward error in ourselves and others?

Atonement is the release from fear, not a dive deeper into it. It is a corrective device, not a punishment, to admit the exact nature of our wrongs and to do our best to make them right. Atonement is essential to the healing of the United States, because there will be no new America until we have done everything possible to right the wrongs of the old one.

Our nation, for many reasons, has developed a public personality that has great difficulty admitting when we have been wrong. Politicians, who ideally should be our primary healers, seem particularly loath to offend any voters by pointing out America’s errors. This deeply obstructs our national healing because a collective, like an individual, simply cannot grow without taking responsibility for its mistakes.

This clearly annoys other nations, which find our sometimes constant finger-wagging in their direction while refusing to admit our own transgressions the stuff of outrageous nerve. Even this, however, is secondary to the fact “that, from a spiritual perspective, God Himself is not amused. “God shall not be mocked” means simply that He isn’t.

What is our resistance to saying, “We have been very wrong. We are sorry and we apologize,” in situations where it is so very clear that our capacity for error is as great as anyone else’s? Are we afraid our children will find us weaker for doing so? Should we not rather be afraid that we are teaching them a false sense of strength—one that does not admit mistakes or humbly ask forgiveness? Should our children not know that, in fact, we are a great nation, with much to celebrate and be proud of, but that has also made mistakes and must ever be on guard against making them again?

Atonement is more than a mere apology. To atone is to do more than say you’re sorry; it is to commit to never do it again. When we atone for past abuses toward someone, our prayer is that God remove whatever character defect within us led to the abuse to begin with, and transform us into someone not likely to repeat the error. And atonement includes the making of amends wherever and however possible.

Many people would say today, “Hey, I wasn’t a slave owner! It’s not my responsibility!” or even, “It’s tragic what they did to the Native Americans, but hey, it’s over.” Yet the concept bears a closer look. Are these things really over? Doesn’t the answer to that question have something to do with who you are and where you live? For poverty-stricken Native Americans living on reservations, or poverty-stricken African-American children living in the inner city, it could be argued that these situations are not over. Their legacies live on. The sins, or misperceptions, of the parents have been handed down to the children in successive generations, and while the original abuses no longer occur, they have “legs” that continue through the course of history. Contemporary poverty is the great-grandchild of abuses long past.

The abolition of slavery could be likened to the removal of a malignant tumor. The question for the doctor would not just be “Did you get out the tumor?” but “Did you get out all the cancer?” As long as there are any cancer cells left in the body, there is danger—because cancer spreads. An institution has been abolished, but the thinking that gave rise to it still lives. When it comes to slavery and racism, we got out the tumor but we didn’t get out all the cancer.

To do that, it would help to apply the tenets of holistic healing. We must address the deeper causal issues involved in racial and ethnic tension today, and then apply the powers of body, mind, and spirit to bring forth the healing of our national wounds. It was another generation’s job to abolish slavery from our country; it is this generation’s job to abolish racism from our hearts.

Forgiveness and Amends

Some people wish we were a color-blind society, but would that really be so wonderful? Homogenizing everyone so as to offend no one is hardly the way to true healing. It is both our unity and our diversity, after all, that underlies the American ideal. The only way we can become truly color-blind—that is, get to the point where we see each other only through the eyes of spirit, not even recognizing physical color—is if we first acknowledge the brilliance of the various colors.

Metaphysically, healing occurs when the darkness is brought to the light. You can’t just say, “Okay, everybody. Let’s love each other and pretend our colors don’t exist, okay?” and then expect everything to be great. Of course not. All that does is to force our issues down deeper, and thus to ultimately exacerbate them. If you go to the doctor with a broken arm, you don’t pretend you’re there to heal your leg. The doctor says, “Let me take a look at that arm.” And similarly, the divine physician says, “Let me take a look at that wound in your psyche,” not, “Let’s ignore that wound.” We need to show it to Him, not cower from Him.

Years ago President Clinton initiated a “national conversation” on race, and certainly with the best of intentions. But that conversation never went deep enough for genuine healing to occur. It remained shallow, for the most part, because most people involved in it did not feel emotional permission to get real, to be authentic, to tell it like it really is. Such a conversation, in order to be meaningful, must be facilitated by someone with the professional skill set to create emotional safety for everyone involved—including those with two or three hundred years of unexpressed anger burrowed deep in their cells. Each of us is carrying around not only our own issues but also the issues of our parents and grandparents and their grandparents before them; like the adult children of alcoholic parents, we are living lives tainted by unprocessed feelings belonging to people long since gone. Psychologically, the United States is like a dysfunctional family system in which huge secrets go undiscussed, unprocessed, breeding all manner of unconscious turmoil within various family members.

Within each of us, however, there is a reservoir of divine power that responds fully to our invitation to enter and restore us. Whether we call this force God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Jewish shekina, the Atman, the Oversoul, nonviolence, universal love, or whatever other words we wish, it is the all-powerful action of a “higher power.” This power cannot work, however, counter to our free will; it must be invoked or consciously invited into our thought system. Then and only then can the Atonement principle free us of the consequences of past mistakes.

Through the power of the Atonement, we summon a higher power to do what the mortal mind by itself cannot do. The hand of God comes upon us and heals our hearts. As we make amends to those to whom we owe amends and try to forgive those who have hurt us, healing forces are released. Through Atonement in the present, we both heal the past and release the future. As America atones for its mistakes, allowing itself the grief and sadness without which hearts cannot heal, love will replace the anger that underlies so much of our national life.

Spiritual understanding takes us beyond a traditional understanding of our problems, and beyond a traditional set of solutions. That is why it is such an important new addition to our political awareness. Some problems take heart work, not just head work. All the laws in the world can’t take a nation through its grieving or to its knees. Our wisdom will do that, or ultimately circumstances will. Those are our only two choices.

In the twenty-first century humanity is being challenged to bring our external realities into line with our internal ones. There are many uncried tears in this country, and every day we put off crying them, we simply create more tears for our children to cry later. Healing any area begins to heal them all.

DANCES WITH DEATH

Native Americans had lived on this continent for 1,000 generations before our European ancestors “discovered” it. The wisdom of the indigenous peoples of North America graced this soil for centuries before the white intruders arrived. It is estimated that in 1492 anywhere from 10 to 25 million indigenous people lived north of Mexico. Within 150 years, as a result of war and disease, there were fewer than a million Indians left here alive.”

Part of the irony of the devastation of the Native American population by white expansion is that the Western world is now near the brink of global disaster because we lack contact with the very quality of consciousness that so many of the Native peoples personified. We killed them, and now we need them. How much better off America would be today had our ancestors been wise enough to take advantage, on a mass level, of the extraordinary opportunity presented to them to marry European and Native American cultures. Using anthropologist Riane Eisler’s terms in her landmark book The Chalice and the Blade, they opted for the dominator rather than partnership model of human development. The only hope for humanity today is if we let go the dominator model and embrace the partnership model instead.

Americans love cowboys. We’ve embraced the myth of the brave pioneer, the explorer of strange lands, the conqueror of unexpected dangers. There’s an upside to that from which clearly we were born as a nation. But the myth has a dark side as well, and processing that myth is critical to our healing. Once again, the yang is extraordinary, but woe the absence of yin, of feeling and understanding. Whether the explorer cowboy pioneer we embrace is Christopher Columbus sailing to America, Buffalo Bill riding out West, or a modern CEO of a multinational corporation expanding uninvited into communities and nations around the globe, it should not be forgotten that that figure, despite his courage and self-sufficiency, is an outlaw. He is not known for his respect for other people, his honor of those who got there first, or his willingness to leave well enough alone when told that he can’t have his way.

The way consciousness operates is that a myth represents a part of ourselves. If we applaud in a myth what should not be applauded, then (1) we are stuck at that place within ourselves, and (2) we are at the effect of that place within ourselves. The price we pay for admiring the conqueror is that we will inevitably be conquered. The universe will make sure of it; it’s an area where we have something to learn.

Demythologizing this figure, removing him (or her) from his pedestal in our imagination, will help free us from his dominion. Our misplaced respect, as well as its dismantling, begins on a symbolic level. Our glorification of Christopher Columbus, for instance, is a mythological distortion, and repealing Columbus Day would be a move in the direction of national healing. For all the fiction created around him, Columbus was a murderer of indigenous peoples, and exalting him is a symbol of our neurotic attraction to violent outlaws. At our current stage of development, if someone violates one person, we can see that the person is a criminal. But if the individual violates many, the material power involved can weirdly obscure the horror of the deed. Part of our evolution involves healing our deadly unconscious connection between brute force and excitement. It is at the core of humanity’s problems, as evidenced by our national as well as personal politics. Once again, if just one person attacks another, it’s obviously horrible. But if a nation attacks another nation—and the attacking nation happens to be us—then all too often it’s a reason to have a drink and celebrate.

Given the fact that Columbus’s life was a model for the standard of enslavement and killing that came to characterize much of European settlement in the New World, to honor him is deeply insulting to our Native American citizens. Moreover, it stunts the collective psyche of the nation that we are so dishonest about our history.

In 1992, at the time of the quincentennial celebration of his “discovery” of America, there was a national rethinking of Columbus’s appropriate place in history. The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation, and genocide for others.” When it comes to celebrating Columbus or Columbus Day, we should just say no.

I have heard people acknowledge that Columbus himself poses a problem, yet they wouldn’t want to give up Columbus Day as a holiday because it celebrates the contributions of Italians to American civilization. If what we are excited about, and indeed we should be, is how many people from other lands have enriched America, then perhaps we could change Columbus Day to Immigrant’s Day; I realize how many people today would not want that, of course, but that’s all the more reason why we should propose it.

We are not so much undereducated regarding Native American history in this country as we are wrongly educated. For better or for worse, we are taught as much by television and movies as we are by textbooks, and in both cases, we have been fed misleading stereotypes regarding the “Cowboy and Indian” days. There was nothing romantic about that era from the Native American point of view. By the late 1800s, there was little left to do but clean up the mess after centuries of the white European’s complete devastation of the indigenous American culture. Native Americans by then were finished as a major civilization; their numbers were decimated and their cultural subjugation was nearly complete.

Brutish behavior toward Native Americans had started centuries before, but that behavior was codified into American law in the nineteenth century. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, paving the way for the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation. What followed was an intense political controversy, in which many brave Americans—including the celebrated Tennessee Senator David Crockett—stood up for conscience against the injustice of the U.S. policy toward Native Americans. His words ring powerfully through the air today: “I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized.” Alas, however, he spoke them to no avail.

In his book Don’t Know Much About History, author Kenneth C. Davis writes:

Early in the summer of 1832, General Scott and the United States Army began the invasion of the Cherokee Nation.

In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles (some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). . . . About 4,000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal. The route they traversed and the journey itself became known as “The Trail of Tears” or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, “The Trail Where They Cried”. . . .

And so a country formed fifty years earlier on the premise “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” brutally closed the curtain on a culture that had done no wrong.

While the Trail of Tears is the most dramatic single example of our nation’s violent behavior toward Native Americans, it was unfortunately part of a much larger historical pattern. What might have been a most glorious cultural partnership—we should remember how many Native Americans graciously welcomed their new white “friends” from across the ocean—became instead the most debased domination of one culture by another. It is left to us to atone for past errors, and seek to redress them.

While in some cases in our history it was death to Native Americans, in others it was merely death to their culture. “Helping” people become “more like us” is more oppression than liberation unless those people want to! And in so many cases, why would they? Native Americans could see, long before we did, the spiritual errors of the white man’s way, the insane brutality of an order that made the word “bigger” more important than the word “good,” and that values outer power over internal wisdom.

While the majority of Native Americans had sought to live peacefully with the white man, their proffers of peace had been met by murder, enslavement, and land theft. The basic suppression of Native American culture became an entrenched cultural phenomenon in America that continues to this day.

Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans were the poorest of the poor in American society. In the early 1900s, Native Americans were concentrated in remote regions of the nation, distant from urban centers of economic growth. From 1890 to 1930, the federal government’s so-called allotment programs vigorously promoted farming as a means for Native Americans to become self-sufficient, but the farmland they were allotted was often arid and of poor quality. In some areas, many tribes were former nomadic hunters and had neither the knowledge nor the desire to become farmers. The history of this period is replete with examples of the most egregious violations of Indian rights.

After forty years, during which time Indians had failed to become self-sufficient, President Roosevelt created the Indian New Deal, trying to help reservations deal with the economic hardship created by the Great Depression. With the outbreak of World War II, however, the Indian New Deal was cut short and a new set of policies—“termination” and “relocation”—were designed to dissolve reservations and resettle American Indians to urban areas. Between 1952 and 1972, more than 100,000 American Indians were relocated to cities, under the belief, illusion, or pretext that exposure to urban labor markets would improve their standard of living. However, Native “Americans often lacked the education, skills, and experience to find employment and benefit from such relocation.

I am not a Native American, and so I can hardly speak for the Native American soul. But words like “relocation” are chilling to me. Forcing people who once roamed free and magnificently over lands they had called theirs for thousands of years, into little areas that we deemed unworthy of us and therefore good enough for them, or into the brash, clinkering maze of urban society on the pretense that “maybe they can find jobs there,” is culturally, spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically criminal. It warrants the grief and tears not only of Native Americans but also of all people of conscience and goodwill. Native American culture is not market based, but spirit based; that is not its primitivism but its sophistication. The sacred nature of all things is deemed far more important than the economic value of anything. We are the barbarians.

Since the early 1970s, the federal government has adopted a policy of “self-determination” that has allowed Native Americans to be more involved in issues affecting their reservations. Native American leaders have taken a variety of steps to increase economic activity, and many of the reservations are endowed with natural resources such as timber, minerals, and water. During the 1980s, many tribes established gambling operations, which have been lucrative for many, though understandably controversial.

Little we have done can heal the collective wound on the soul of the Sioux, the Navajo, the Cherokee, and others—peoples who bear the legacy of one of the most spiritually advanced races of people, now diminished in both stature and freedom. Today’s rates of alcoholism, poverty, and depression within the Native American community are understandable tragedies given the historical circumstances from which they stem.

If we’re interested in healing our national soul, we will officially atone to the Native American culture and its people. Among other things, this will have to include Atonement for the ways we continue to transgress today.

Now, of course, America is once again embroiled in a drama by which America’s shadow is threatening to obscure the light at the heart of Native American culture. The imperialistic tendencies of our ancestors never having been fully faced, and healed, we continue far too often to repeat the historical patterns by which we seem to feel entitled for no other reason than that we want to, to steal other people’s land, culture, and resources. Such is the reality today at Standing Rock, in North and South Dakota. Since 2014, Sioux tribes have been opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would stretch 2,600 miles from Canada, through the United States, partially on land located above the Sioux water supply. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported more than 3,300 incidents of leaks and ruptures at oil and gas pipelines since 2010 and in 2017, 210,000 gallons of oil leaked from the similarly controversial Keystone pipeline, also in South Dakota. Sioux “water protectors” have been joined by thousands of others in protesting the Dakota pipeline, in defiance of gargantuan corporate and governmental efforts to ignore, and even trample on, Native American rights.

Once again, this is not a new historical contest; it is the continuation of an ancient one, one that has in fact never ended. The good news, if there is any, is how many Americans do now recognize that this is a struggle not only for the Sioux, but for the soul of America. The task of every generation is to do our part to further manifest America’s First Principles. More than water is at stake here; the principle of equality before the law is at stake here. Whether it is Native Americans seeking to protect their water in South Dakota, or poor residents seeking to protect their children from lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, it behooves every American to ask ourselves whether the problem would exist if these things were happening in one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

In the last few decades, there has been a growing renaissance of regard for the genius of Native American culture. Hopefully, this will increase awareness among all Americans, not only of the debt we owe to Native Americans for what they gave to us but also for what was done to them as a result of the white man’s expansion westward. Native Americans themselves have been having a good long cry for the last three hundred years; when our hearts are touched by the tragedy of Native American history, by the obliteration of practically an entire civilization, then surely we, too, will cry. Americans need a good cry over things such as this. Our apparent insensitivity to the sufferings of people “not like us” is a national character defect, a part of our political personality unworthy of who we really are. If one suffering child, of any color, were to be placed in front of the average American, I believe that that American would care and act to assuage the suffering. But there is something about lots of people suffering that, quite counterintuitively, makes Americans tune out instead of tune in. Awareness of our tendency to deny what is too difficult to face—and asking God to heal us of this collective defect and wound—is part of our path to higher consciousness and ultimately our national healing.

Dear God,
Please forgive us our grievous errors.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
our early treatment of the indigenous people,
the natives of the North American continent,
who suffered devastation at the hands of our forefathers.
We atone and ask forgiveness for
the places where we dishonor them still.
Help us, Lord,
to mend our thoughts that we no longer
rebel against Your Spirit, which is Love.
Forgive us now.
Turn our darkness into light, dear God,
through Your power which does these things,
that we might awaken to a new America.
May hatred be replaced by love here,
and true justice prevail at last.
May we meet each other in reborn brotherhood,
and begin again in love.

Dear Lord,
Please compensate for the injustices done
unto the Native American peoples,
and use us to bring forth new good.
We atone for the past,
and ask that our hearts be opened now.

Dear God,
Please restore what has been harmed
and heal us all.
To our Native American brothers and sisters, we say:
Please forgive us
for the evils that have been perpetrated
against your people
in the name of the United States.
At last,
may the spirit of your ancestors
shine joyfully in your children.
Forgive us, God.
Amen

RACIAL ATONEMENT

The United States is like a torch that has, in various chapters of our history, both enlightened the world and burned the world.

A wound very much alive in America is the tortured relationship between blacks and whites. For this, atonement is only the beginning of what is morally demanded of us. “I tremble for my country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “when I consider God is just, and that His justice shall not sleep forever.” With the abolition of slavery we began the road to political justice, and with the civil rights movement we continued it. The underlying conflict regarding racial tension in America today is between those who essentially believe that we’ve done enough—that we’ve created social equality for African Americans—and those who believe that while we have made strides in certain areas, in other ways the legacy of slavery continues and we are still in the process of making true amends for its evils.

Thought is the causal level of the universe. In abolishing slavery, we did not abolish racist thinking. Indeed, such societies as the Ku Klux Klan were founded after the end of the Civil War, in direct response to the abolition of slavery. While external legislative remedies are an aid to racial healing, spiritual forces are necessary to heal the terrible wounds to the heart and soul. Cellular memory of hatred and abuse has accumulated among African Americans to such an extent that it has become a generational resentment, leaving only two choices on the road ahead: greater love, or greater violence.

There are myriad reasons why so many Americans resist a deeper level of atonement toward African Americans, much of it having to do with an ignorance of certain facts about our history. Part of our job, then, is to better understand our past so we can heal our present and free our future.

There is much to understand, much to dissect, much to pray about, and much to do. America will not heal on the issue of race until we acknowledge our culpability in institutionalizing racism not just in the past but in the present, and seek to make serious amends for transgressions which have occurred throughout our history. While it is true that millions of African Americans now have opportunities their ancestors could only dream of, it is not just what people have experienced but also what their parents and parents’ parents experienced that often moves through our veins and erupts like hot oil. Have we done a lot? Oh, yes; the abolition of slavery, civil rights legislation, and so forth were hardly nothing. But do we still have a lot to do? Again, oh, yes; current issues regarding voter suppression, police brutality, and mass incarceration show an alarming trend in the wrong direction. Through Atonement we must heal the past, and through the making of amends we can heal the future.

While it’s true that great strides have been taken in the area of civil rights—I remember as a child seeing a sign at the doctor’s office building in Houston, Texas, that said “colored bathrooms downstairs”—in other ways, the darker shadow of racism within the American psyche has simply morphed into other symptoms. The racial inequity in America’s criminal justice system is an example; according to a report released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, black men receive prison sentences 20 percent longer than do white men for similar crimes. America is now incarcerating a higher proportion of African Americans than South Africa incarcerated black Africans at the height of apartheid.

One in four black Americans lives in poverty—double the rate of whites. Half of all black children in America under the age of six live in poverty. Unemployment for African Americans is almost twice as high as it is for whites. For the same educational background blacks can expect to make 69 percent of the income of whites. Economic injustice toward blacks in America is a systemically racist phenomenon, and to minimize it is further racism. When African Americans understandably object to underlying racism in economic or criminal policies, they’re liable to be told in one way or another: “There you go—complaining again!”

We are saying to people who are as afraid of the police as they are of the criminals, whose children do not have safe schools, whose children are at risk even walking to school, whose children do not even have enough school supplies and textbooks at their schools, whose children have practically no chance of finding a job in the neighborhood even if they do by some miracle muster the courage and the inner strength to make it through that dangerous maze and graduate from high school, that you’d better fly right now and not make a single false step from here on out, because we’ve had it up to here with helping you. I’m not an African American so I can’t speak for anyone else’s feelings, but if it were me I would find that deeply insulting.

The problems run deep, and so must the healing. Many Americans now understand that we need an integrative approach to the healing of our political wounds—one that recognizes that how people feel about something is not just a secondary issue. And that is where the power of Atonement comes into the mix, achieving the “qualitative change in our hearts” to which Dr. King referred. All over the country, people are gathering in racial healing circles to talk out these issues, pray for reconciliation, and seek the power of genuine forgiveness.

In 1997, President Clinton offered a public apology on behalf of the nation to the victims of the federal government’s Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, an infamous chapter in the history of American medical research. In that study, starting in 1932, 399 indigent black men from Tuskegee, Alabama, were told that they would receive free medical treatment for syphilis, but instead were left untreated and carefully monitored. Even after penicillin was found to be a successful cure in the mid-1940s, the men were left untreated. “To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your Federal Government orchestrated a study so clearly racist,” said the President. The government, said President Clinton, “did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.”

It was very heartening to hear the President make his statement, but that was decades ago. It is also very important that we not use our apologies for specific instances of racism to help us ignore the larger issue of our society’s debt to a long-enslaved people. It is not enough to treat the symptoms of racism; we must treat the disease itself. Tuskegee was part of a larger pattern of abuse that stemmed from a general feeling that the lives of black people do not deserve the same respect and consideration as the lives of white people. For millions of black children today, the social diseases of poverty, ignorance, and substandard medical care are going every bit as dangerously untreated as was syphilis in Tuskegee all those years ago. The bigger problem is far from behind us.

I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from America’s black communities and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens. Although the emancipation of the slaves gave African Americans their political freedom, their bondage was replaced by a more subtle but equally oppressive form of slavery: an economic slavery that continues to this day. Lack of educational opportunities, lack of health care, lack of job training, lack of economic revitalization measures, lack of mass transit, and lack of adequate housing among poor segments of the African-American population are all examples of white America’s failure to pay one of its most important debts. In fact—and this is the larger issue—we do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid.

What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries? Are we afraid that our feelings of guilt, were they to be authentically owned, would overwhelm us? Why are we avoiding what any individual knows: that cleaning up the past is a prerequisite for a fruitful future?

After the Civil War ended, America’s former slaves were just left on their own to try to make lives for themselves. But in many cases, because of the rise of the most heinous forms of white supremacy, they were not actually allowed to. From lynchings to Jim Crow laws to segregation, blacks in the American South, though no longer slaves, were denied the ability to truly move forward. This problem was not addressed adequately until the 1960s. Given the historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, one can understand why Abolition itself seemed such an extraordinary thing—which it was. But while many of the descendants of slaves have clearly forged lives of triumph and abundance, millions more now pack the inner cities of the United States. For them, the trauma is far from over. Those neighborhoods are, in many ways, new slave quarters.

Today, one is reminded of the words of Dr. King, “If it happens to white people, they call it a Depression. If it happens to black people, they call it a social problem.”

An apology is the yin we need, and serious restitution is the yang. When African Americans say the word “reparations,” you’d think they had suggested something completely outrageous. But the general concept is legitimate. Germany has paid $89 billion in restitution to Jews since World War II. The United States paid $20,000 to every Japanese American who had been sent to a concentration camp here in America during World War II. Nothing short of a massive investment in America’s African-American poor—the true legacy of slavery—is a responsible sign of America’s willingness to heal itself racially. The most depressed communities in America, which are primarily African-American, cry out for help and we act like it’s some major liberal coup every time we even throw them a crumb.

After World War II, the United States spent $12 billion over four years on the Marshall Plan, rebuilding the devastated economies of Western Europe. Why would we be less generous to citizens of the United States? The idea that helping people—particularly people whose ancestors we have wronged, and transgressions against whom we have not yet fully redressed—is some liberal conspiracy promulgated by political Progressives intent on creating a culture of dependency, is itself but propaganda created to justify unjust economic policies.

We need rituals of atonement and apology for American racism, past and present. I have experienced such prayers, and their healing power is profound. But we also need to make a serious and honorable amends, in the form of substantial efforts to economically revitalize a segment of our population that happens to be poor and happens to be black. Why should our national attitudes be so punitive rather than loving? Dr. King said that the American Congress was much less compassionate than the American people, and I think that is true today. We are a better nation than this. If we will devote the next ten years of our history to turning this area of national shame into an area of national atonement, the gift to our children and our children’s children—all our children—will be immeasurable.

AN APOLOGY IS so important because, without it, there is no real atonement. It releases the emotional truth of a situation. Certain Americans think that blacks just need to forgive slavery and move on with their lives—but isn’t it easier to forgive someone when he or she has had the courtesy to apologize?

A sincere apology is more than just “emotional symbolism.” An apology is an act of atonement, and only in a society that trivializes faith is atonement viewed as mere symbol.

Faith, for those of us who embrace it, is as real as a car, a house, or a piece of legislation. The power of God in our lives is no less real than technology, business, or money. The fact that the action of faith is invisible to the physical eye does not make it a mere function of our imagination or a metaphor or psychological child’s play.

The trivialization of faith by the political status quo—from the Left with its rolled eyes, to the Right with its hypocritical words of support—has created a huge void in the center of American political consciousness. Faith in God is not faith in a particular religious dogma. Faith in God is faith in love, faith in a higher power, and ultimately faith in each other. Atonement means turning back the darkness through a prayerful embrace of the light.

Human beings, on the level of spirit, are not separate but joined as one. In the words of Dr. King, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” The reason the Golden Rule is essential to all religious thought is that what we do to others will be done to us, and if not to us then to our children or our children’s children. We will reap what we sow, and what we withhold from others will be withheld from us. Time itself is a trick of the mind. We must give justly, not merely because we’re “good” but because we understand spiritual Law. It is no longer possible to be realistically satisfied with our own circumstances, if the opportunities for the same abundance are unfairly denied to others. The day of reckoning is at hand.

There are those who would point to blacks who have behaved criminally or dysfunctionally, and try to use that as justification for not performing our ethical duty to the African-American community. Or, conversely, one can point to black stars who have triumphed, and try to claim that because they made it big in America, that proves there is no real problem. But neither argument is valid. Every group of people has its shadow element, and every group has its geniuses. Neither is an excuse for failing to live up to our moral obligations. America has a huge—not a nonexistent, not a small, nor even a medium-sized—problem on its hands. We should see this for what it is and act accordingly.

When it comes to institutionalized systems of racial injustice, there is a myth in the United States that what has merely lessened has in fact ended. White America has not yet given up our collective attitude, however covert, that we are a superior race and culture. While there are many millions of people to whom this attitude truly does not apply, it continues to permeate our social, political, and economic policies. God does not love anyone more than He loves anyone else, and His universe will not endlessly tolerate an attitude on the part of white-skinned people that we have, for any reason whatsoever, greater right than others do to the opportunities afforded us by this great land. It is astonishing to me that a culture that mass-murdered Native Americans and brought millions of Africans here to be slaves has the audacity to still say to those and those like them, “Make sure you don’t ask for too much.”

Psychologically, we are subconsciously afraid of those whom we have wronged. We are afraid that they will punish us, as we secretly feel we deserve to be punished. I believe that this psychological dynamic is at the core of much of white America’s attitude toward African Americans. We are afraid to truly share power with blacks because we are afraid of what they might do with such power if they had it. We are afraid that they might treat us as we have treated them.

Meanwhile, with this attitude—however unconscious on our part—we perpetuate the very forces that would make anyone angry, thus adding to the already raging fire that burns within so many hearts.

Today, we have issues in our criminal justice system that are as troubling as any economic transgressions against our African-American population. Mass incarceration now constitutes the single largest urban industry in America, as tougher sentencing laws instituted in the 1990s have led to an explosion of our prison population. Unfortunately, while African Americans make up 12 to 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 35 percent of jail inmates and are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. Add to that the clear instances of police brutality against blacks that have occurred over the last few years in cities such as Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, coupled with the extraordinary failure of our criminal justice system to convict those whom we saw in video after video, with our own eyes, proactively assault unarmed blacks, and I don’t know how any white American can say, “I don’t understand what they’re complaining about.

America will come face-to-face with this shadow element in our national psyche, or we will continue to pass along its effects from generation to generation. There will be no healing of America’s soul until we pray for racism to be removed from our hearts, and for the strength and political courage it will take to remove its tentacles from our society. We must stop pretending there is no problem here; our denial and obfuscation makes a mockery of love. Meanwhile, there is a profound spiritual authority among those who have already forgiven us, in spite of the fact that we have not yet even asked forgiveness. It is particularly prevalent among certain black women—particularly older ones—and it is one of the sacred spots on the American psychic landscape. I have been personally blessed by it. The day will come when we will see things with our spiritual eyes, and when we do, we will stand in awe before the power of this love. It is a big love. It is a blessing on us all. It does more to keep this country from exploding than any of us will ever know.

THESE WORDS OF Robert Kennedy resonate today:

I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: Not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies, and what they can do to this country. There is a contest, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.

The universe will compensate us royally if we do what it takes to truly right the spiritual course of this nation. White America will not lose money or power if it pays off its moral debts: The whole country will become richer and more powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. We will take a quantum leap forward as a nation if we embrace the opportunity before us and genuinely atone.

“The holiest of all the spots on earth,” according to A Course in Miracles, “is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.” Let us imagine the glory that could be, and pray to bring it forth.

Dear God,
Please forgive us for the evils of slavery,
racism and injustice.
Please heal, dear Lord,
our hardened hearts.
We atone to God,
and ask forgiveness of the African-American people,
for the slavery in both body and spirit
of your men, your women, and your children.
To you who have lived among us,
and suffered the sting of our unfair dominion—
For the abuse of both your ancestors
and your children,
we pray for the absolution of the Lord.
We ask that God restore us all,
and use us as His instruments
for the resurrection of good.
We deeply apologize for the errors of the past
and ask that America’s heart be opened now.
If we could rewrite history,
we would.
We cannot,
but God can.

Dear God, please do.
To the African-American community,
we acknowledge the tears of your people,
the suffering of your ancestors,
and the brilliance of your culture.
We bless your children,
please bless ours.
May God in His glory
forge a brotherhood between us,
for brothers indeed
we are.

Dear God,
Please work this miracle.
Amen

“THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM AND IRAQ

ONE OF THE reasons we need to atone for our treatment of both Native Americans and black Americans is that it will help us break the chain with that part of our national character that still wants to grab for what it wants in the world, without regard for the life or livelihood of others.”

Robert McNamara, who was President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, wrote in his memoirs that the war was “a terrible mistake.” More than 59,000 Americans dead, and 2 million Vietnamese, plus countless other devastated American lives, and it was all “a terrible mistake.” McNamara also mentioned that he, and others who planned and directed that war, had no knowledge or understanding of the religion, language, philosophy, or character of the people of Vietnam—and no one to teach them, even if they wanted to learn.

After hearing that, if we were an enlightened society, we would all have gone to bed for three days. We would cry, moan, get sick, scream it out, punch punching bags, do whatever it takes to get the pain up and out of our cells. There is an inestimable human tragedy stuck to this nation as a result of that war, a significant aspect of which is the ever-more-frayed bond of trust between the American people and our government.

The Vietnam War Memorial is a uniquely powerful place because it is emotionally true. It doesn’t lie. It pictures the war as a huge black gash across our landscape, which it is. It appropriately memorializes the lives of those who died such purposeless, tragic deaths in Vietnam. And it helps us grieve not only for them but also for who we were as a nation before that war so wounded us.

At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.

At a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, I saw the following letter posted by an ex-Marine. It reveals more truth about that war than most history books do.

On the Second of July 1967, Alpha and Bravo companies of the First Battalion, Ninth Marines were on patrol just a few hundred meters south of the DMZ.

Bravo blundered into a well-set ambush at the marketplace; soon, Alpha, too, was in the thick of it.

The enemy consisted of a regiment of the North Vietnamese Army supported by artillery, heavy mortars, rockets, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.

Charlie and Delta companies were rushed to the field in support, but the outcome had been decided. The Marines were overwhelmingly outnumbered.

But, worse than that, they were equipped with Colt M-16 rifles. Their M-14 rifles, which had proven so effective and reliable, were stored in warehouses, somewhere in the rear.

The M-16s would fire once or twice—maybe more—then jam. The extractor would rip the rim off the casing. Then the only way to clear the chamber and resume firing was to lock open the bolt, run a cleaning rod down the barrel, and knock the casing loose. Soon it would jam again.

This was the rifle supplied to her troops by the richest nation on earth. The enemy was not so encumbered. They carried rifles that were designed in the Soviet Union and manufactured in one of the poorest nations on earth—the so-called People’s Republic of China. Their rifles fired. Fired every time. They ran amongst the Marines, firing at will.

Sixty-four men in Bravo were killed that afternoon. Altogether, the battalion lost around a hundred of the nation’s finest men. The next morning, we bagged them like groceries. We consigned their bodies to their families and commended their souls to God. May He be as merciful as they were courageous.

Today, people are still debating the issue: Was it the fault of the ammo? The fault of the rifle? Neither. It was the fault of the politicians and contractors and generals. People in high places knew the rifles and ammo wouldn’t work together. The military didn’t want to buy the rifle when Armalite was manufacturing it. But when Colt was licensed as the manufacturer, they suddenly discovered it was a marvelous example of Yankee ingenuity.

Sgt. Brown told them it was garbage. Col. Hackworth told them it was garbage. And every real Grunt knew it was garbage. It was unsuited for combat.

There was no Congressional investigation. No contractor was ever fined for supplying defective material. No one uncovered the bribes paid to government officials. No one went to jail. And the mothers of dead Marines were never told that their sons went into combat unarmed.

To all outward appearances, those Marines died of gunshot and fragmentation wounds. But a closer examination reveals that they were first stabbed in the back by their countrymen. The politicians, contractors, and generals have retired to comfortable estates now. Their ranks have been filled by their clones—greedy invertebrates every one. They should hope that God is more forgiving than I.

Brave men should never be commanded by cowards.
First Lieutenant Harvey G. Wysong
0100308
United States Marine Corps Reserve
First Battalion, Nine Marines”

It was not just Johnson and McNamara who made a terrible mistake in Vietnam: the entire nation made a terrible mistake in letting them do it. One would think that, after such a debacle, America would no longer allow those in power, in uniform, in “command,” to so easily make absurd decisions on our behalf. And yet we do. What a tragedy, all that false respect we had—and still have—for the trappings and illusions of worldly power. We still have not opened ourselves collectively to the shame and horror of that huge mistake. We have not atoned to our vets, to their families, to God, to other nations involved; or to ourselves. Until we do, we shall remain in some way at the effect of that mistake. Even worse, when you do not atone for a mistake—when you do not allow the horror of it to penetrate your conscious awareness—then you are almost doomed to repeat it.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I was one of many Americans saying, “This is Vietnam all over again.” At the time, of course, we were described by officialdom as facile thinkers who simply didn’t understand the severity of the situation. What we did understand, of course, was that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11; there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in fact that country played the part of buffer with Iran; and even if Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, let us be adult enough to remember we do business with countries that have weapons of mass destruction every day. Oh, and Saddam Hussein killed his own people? So have the Chinese, and we did not invade them.

We need a miracle of God to remove from us what has become an almost pathological romanticization of the military. I have great respect for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces, but their idealization as ultimate and exclusive saviors in times of national distress is a disservice to them and to us all. If America spent more time and resources waging peace, we would find ourselves waging far less war. In the words of Defense Secretary General James Mattis, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, I need to buy more ammunition.”

Yet our attitudes in this area, judging from our military budget and behavior, are if anything less enlightened today than ever. We seem to have a slavish devotion to the idea that brute force beats soul force, spending one dollar on conflict prevention for every $1,885 on the military. The increased militarism in contemporary America is part of a larger, deeply appalling glorification of violence. We must heal ourselves of this, and with God’s help we can. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq,
and any other military misadventures
that might have been prevented.
We deeply apologize
to other nations we have wronged,
and to ourselves;
to their people,
and to our own.
And most particularly, dear God,
to our veterans,
and to the spirits of those soldiers who lost their lives,
may they rest in peace.
To those who were sent there and survived,
may you be restored.
To those of you who lost your loved ones,
may you find peace.

Dear God,
Please remove from this nation
our militaristic illusions,
our temptation
to see more power in hatred
than power in love,
and to believe the lies
of a war machine
before the truth
in our hearts.

Dear God,
Please forgive us
for our violation of any nation
toward whom we have done wrong.
Please lift us up.
Please heal this wound.
Amen

To heal ourselves, we must grieve our past.

You cannot dedicate a nation to the high ideals to which this one was dedicated and not expect the soul to rebel in some way when you start acting as if you didn’t really mean it.

From the genocide of Native Americans to our systemic racism to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the United States needs, as they say in the twelve-step recovery program, to take a “fearless moral inventory.” We are not to spend the rest of our lives in an endless string of mea culpas, but as soon as we say at least a few sincere ones, the miracle of atonement will begin to release our collective soul.

God is merciful. I do not believe He is angry, but He’s not kidding either. He has asked us to love each other as He so loves us. And to Him, these are not just words.

Chapter 4 will be emailed tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles

CHAPTER 2
DREAMS AND PRINCIPLES

Most all Americans were raised to believe and continue to be inspired by the thought that America is a place where dreams come true. People came to this country and continue to come—from villages and cities, farmlands and mountains, every continent and religious orientation—in search of a better life. They have traveled, often against unimaginable odds, packed like sardines in ships and boxcars, with an almost superhuman perseverance. They have desperately climbed walls while soldiers shot at their backs. They have rushed, clutching babies, to cross superhighways without getting run over, knowing that even if they made it across, border guards awaited them on the other side. Whether they came two hundred years ago or two months ago, escaping religious persecution or crushing poverty, their hearts were hearkening to the same song of hope: “Get to the United States. In the United States, things might be better.

Unless your ancestors were slaves brought here from Africa, someone in your family came to this country in hopes of finding an easier life. Someone’s prayer—regardless of whom your ancestors were—was that you might someday have a better life than his or hers. That you might live the American Dream.

A most pertinent question at this time in our history is, “What is the American Dream?” How we answer that question goes far toward defining our relationship to citizenship and to democracy itself. Sometimes we cynically dismiss the idea of an American Dream, spitting at the suffering of millions to whom the concept meant everything, absolutely everything. Surely it behooves us to ask, “What is this thing for which so many have lived and died? What is this gift that I have been given, yet which I often treat as though it is no gift at all?”

We are used to politicians exploiting the concept of the American Dream, using the phrase casually as though all of us understand what it means. But in fact it can mean several things, and in the last few decades, we have clearly emphasized its material rather than its philosophical implications. Is the American Dream a social and political concept—that everyone here can be free? Or is it an economic concept—that anyone here can get rich?

Today, the American Dream is defined by most public leaders in primarily economic terms. Economic progress is deemed synonymous with social progress—if the economy is booming, then America must be doing great! But such an assumption bears a closer look. There are, in fact, powerful countries in the world today—China, for instance—that have adopted economic freedoms while suppressing social and political ones. Money—either the fun of having it or the stress of achieving it—can easily distract us from essential truths regarding the nature of freedom itself.

If our bottom line is money, then we are committed to materialistic values. But if our bottom line is the dream of freedom, then the most important things are not material, and many things are more important than money. Money, like tears, can easily blur our vision. It can seem that because we have money, the dream is alive and well by definition. Or because we don’t have money, we don’t have a lot of time to think about it one way or the other. Or while it’s true we don’t have much money ourselves, we keep hearing constantly how good the economy is doing, so the dream must be flourishing for someone!

In fact, there is much more to freedom than economics. If our dream is merely to make money, then we’re dreaming small—we’re not asking for too much but for too little. We were born, as Americans, into the philosophical promise that here, in these United States, humanity could make its dreams come true. And the highest state of dreaming, for a person or for a nation, is not only that we will get something, but that we will become someone. From that state of being flows all abundance. Money doesn’t control the flow; consciousness controls the flow.”

What our souls truly long for is a state of being, and contrary to the insidious lies of either consumer or political advertising, that state cannot be bought. Money cannot buy internal freedom. It can in many cases buy the things we think will make us feel free, but like Dorothy when she finally meets the Wizard of Oz, we will always at last be forced to see that things have no power to take us home. Home is what we long for; but home is not a material but rather a spiritual condition. We will not be home until we truly, deeply love one another. When that occurs, money will not be allowed to interfere with our commitment to love. Healthy competition, yes; exploitation and economic injustice, no. And from our spiritually rising up that way, we will counterintuitively learn the true secret of material abundance: that it flows more effectively from love than from fear. Thinking that we need the material world makes us slaves to the material world; knowing that we are not of the material world turns us into its masters.

The fact that the American Dream has historically been driven not by money, but by dedication to the creation and maintenance of liberty, is the spiritual blessing that has drawn to us such extraordinary material fortune. As we have sought to bless humanity, so God has clearly blessed us. Our dollar bill is inscribed with a mystical seal “bearing the symbol of brotherly love. Nothing threatens our social order—including our economics—more than a diminished commitment to the dream proclaimed on that seal.”

We are living at a time when the needs of the marketplace are placed so high above the needs of people, here and around the world, that we are known as much for our hypocrisy as for our genius. And this is what we must correct, as other generations before us have corrected the errors of their times. We are a nation that has sold our soul to the highest bidder. And now our economics must be brought into alignment with our goodness, or we will lose the blessing at the core of our democracy. We will no longer be able to bequeath it to our children, as others, at often such great cost, bequeathed it to us.

AS A NATION, we have a collective psyche, a common river of thoughts and feelings that runs through the soul of every American. That river runs beneath our dreaming like an underground source of nourishment and aid—America’s emotional Nile. The American Dream, when best understood, is the fact that we have the right to dream at all. It is the right to expect that our talents and abilities and diligence, not the prejudices of others, will determine the nature of the lives we live. That is a spiritual principle, and a radical thought, to which the nation was committed at its founding. While reality often contradicts the dream, and various forces would seek to squelch it, the American Dream stays alive within the collective mind.

A national dream, in order to remain viable, must be as a spark reignited in the heart of each generation. Otherwise, our river of hope dries up. A dream doesn’t rest on reason but, rather, flies on the wings of passion, and unfortunately, most modern education systems do not honor passion. We are not taught to love our great historical truths but merely perhaps to memorize them. For far too many of us, the embrace of essential democratic principles has not been the reenactment of a courageous, experiential response to the darkness of ancestral history, but merely a mechanical recitation of words. And yet poignantly, many millions of Americans would still willingly risk their lives for these principles. There is something in us well aware of an unutterably precious nugget of truth in the vision of our forefathers, which in some mysterious way still applies to all of us.

Our right to dream whatever life we wish for ourselves, and our responsibility to respect the dreams of others, is the fulcrum of the American ideal. Even in the most oppressive societies, some people have the right to dream. What makes a democracy different is that we are all supposed to have that right, and a reasonable opportunity to make our dreams come true.

Many people in America have lived lives of very limited, even cruelly squelched dreams not through any fault of their own but, through accidents of history and various forms of obstruction and injustice. That has been true in the past and it is true today. To deny this is not to honor the dream but to mock it. If any Americans are denied the right to weave their dreams, then America itself isn’t weaving hers. It is the job of every generation of Americans to further expand and fulfill the dream of freedom and justice for all.

In former generations, both bondage and freedom had mainly a material face. Slavery, oppression, and injustice were externalized, therefore our dreams of ending them were made external as well. In ending slavery, we committed to the dream. In passing child labor laws, we committed to the dream. In passing civil rights legislation, we committed to the dream. Every generation plays out the struggle between those who would expand the dream and those who would constrict it. Reinterpreting the American Dream to mean very little more than a job that pays well is to rob it of its deeper meaning. Now, in order to expand the dream of freedom for the times in which we live, our main responsibility is to re-examine the meaning of both freedom and bondage.

“Today, our states of bondage are not material so much as emotional and psychological and spiritual, and all states of material bondage still existing would disappear in a moment were we to free our hearts and minds. What we most need to be free of now is our tendency to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, our tendency to isolate rather than join with others, our own selfishness and narcissism and unforgiveness and greed. Those tendencies are not our sins, but our wounds. They are our modern prisons, and the modern version of the American Dream is to break free of these chains within ourselves.

THE AMERICAN DREAM began with those who came here to escape their nightmares. Some, in fact, found their nightmares here. Our Founders were the oddest mix of all: they both articulated the dream for themselves and their children and, in the case of those who owned slaves, perpetrated a nightmare on others. Now we find ourselves, as their descendants, with the job of maintaining and extending our national dreams, and awakening from the horrors of our national nightmares.

Our Founders were not perfect people—a fact to be neither whitewashed nor ignored—but they reached nonetheless for extraordinary ideals and encased them in a Constitution that institutionalizes our liberty. They risked their lives signing the Declaration of Independence, thus making a historic break from the past—a past they deemed an unworthy template for the human experience. They changed the course of human events, reaching beyond the accepted boundaries of what was to be expected from life, stretching the limits of human possibility. They left in their wake a compelling promise, not only to Americans but also to people throughout the world, that a society could exist in which the individual talents and abilities of free, self-governed people could come together fruitfully, harnessed in the service of a collective good.

They also left in their wake, of course, the tragic irony of the evil disconnect between a nation dedicated to the rights of all men, and the institution of slavery, the oppression of women, and the genocide of Native Americans. The juxtaposition of those historical realities lies at the crux of our ongoing narrative.

The founding of America is not a tale drawn from one-dimensional, perfect lives. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Paine were very real people—nothing in their day like the formal and official portraits of them that now hang in polite museums. The same is true of their successors—the great Ameri“can statesmen, political thinkers, social reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists who have helped us refound ourselves from that day to our own time.

In making wooden characters of very juicy people we have diminished our emotional connection to them. Lincoln would bury his head in his hands each time news reports reached him of massive casualties in the Civil War, sobbing, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.” Polio victim Franklin D. Roosevelt clung to the arm of his son in a heroic effort to appear to walk on his own to the podium at the 1932 Democratic Convention, knowing that if Americans thought he could not walk they would never elect him. He succeeded, and was then described by a friend as having been “cleansed, illumined and transformed by his pain.

What is important is not merely that we record history, or that we understand it, from a seemingly objective perspective. What matters is that we take it personally, that we own it in the deepest part of ourselves, that we might solidify its power where it is something to be proud of and try to transform it where it is not.

The great figures of American history still reach us from the grave, having said and done things that affect each of us in a practical manner, every day of our lives. Their stories illuminate not only what happened before but most significantly what is likely to happen again. We are challenged by an adequate knowledge of history to measure our lives in relation to it, to succeed where others have faltered, to run the race that others ran, to try to keep the wheels of history moving in a positive direction. The past teaches us, most important, that the movement of history in a positive direction can never, ever be taken for granted.

Yet our generation did take it for granted. As inheritors of our Founders’ vision, we just seemed to assume that the vision was being looked after by someone. We acted like heirs to a huge financial fortune who didn’t seem to think that we needed to look after the accounts. We figured showing up to vote every four, maybe every two years would be enough; we didn’t seem to realize we were also going to have to think about what was happening. We figured “political people” were doing that.

But the Founders’ vision is of a country governed by its citizens, and citizens who do not vigorously think about their government will end up governed by someone else. And that is exactly what has happened.

Having lost our revolutionary fervor—bought off, in the end, so easily—we became like the royalists who did not support the revolutionaries, who chose to remain in the yoke of serfdom, trading the sometimes uncomfortable quest for freedom for the comfort of false security. Our Founders asserted the dramatic proposition that if ordinary people are deliberative and responsible, then they can run the affairs of their nation. But decades ago, too many of us stopped doing that. With our voter participation among the lowest of any democracy in the world, we have allowed an unholy alliance of government—like a new monarchy—and corporate influence—like a new aristocracy—to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder. Surely, were they here now they would worry for the dream of liberty that they weaved for their posterity. We have not lost our rights, but neither are these rights profoundly secure. We are much like a massively bleeding person who has not died yet. That person will die unless transfused. And we will lose the precious blood of our democratic freedoms if we do not wake up and act.

We became a distracted nation, knowing more about the lives of celebrities than of our great historical figures, and more about the way our toys worked than the way our democracy works. Yet now, with the experience of the last few years, millions are waking up to the crisis this has created. There is a hunger rising among us to get back to the things we forgot along the way.

Revisiting the First Principles of our democracy are an essential tool in reclaiming it. The principles that our Founders elucidated in the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, then continuing with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, are the sacred powers at the core of American democracy. They are not rules but values. They act as pillars upholding the dynamic energy of American democracy, and they can handle “any assault except the people’s diminished commitment to them. It is seriously detrimental to our individual and collective good that the average American citizen can’t quite tell you what those principles are.

Our democratic principles are the essential ingredients in the American Dream. They protect the dream and stave off the nightmares. They are the light at the center of our democratic hopes.

FIRST PRINCIPLES

America’s First Principles are simple and basic. They are undergirded by an even more basic idea: that we are a democracy and thus govern ourselves. These principles are guideposts for the process of doing so. They are the keys to our freedom and the freedom of our children.

We must reclaim our passion for these principles. Citizenship means more than voting, paying taxes, or obeying laws. It is, when we choose it to be, a powerful expression of self, the absence of which makes it easy to steal from us the powers we have been granted.

America’s First Principles are not partisan issues. They are the things on which we have agreed to agree. We agree that all people should be equal before the law. We agree that power in America shall stem not from the government to the people but rather from the people to the government. We agree to seek to balance individual rights with protection of the general welfare. And we agree that people shall have the right to freely practice and share their religious, social, and political beliefs without threat of external tyranny.

A nation “so conceived,” in the words of Lincoln, is divinely inspired by the universal blessing inherent in these First Principles. Divine inspiration is not a metaphor. From a spiritual perspective, it is a literal power to transcend and subsume all lesser ideas.

There are dramatic examples throughout our history of contests between those who would commit the nation to its stated principles and those who would compromise those principles for short-term personal or economic gain. The Civil War, for instance, pitted those who chose to hold the nation to its principle of equality for all against those who tried to secede from the Union rather than give up slavery and comply.

In other words, our governmental principles are often more advanced than we are, owing to the extraordinary prescience and genius of our Founders. In 1801, the newly elected President Jefferson admonished the nation to make “periodic recourse to first principles,” relying on their power and the power of our collective agreement to adhere to them, to guide us as beacons through darkened times.

It is extremely rare that an issue comes up in American society that does not have light cast upon it by our First Principles. They form America’s political bedrock. Today, our problem is that most Americans do not know what those principles are. We were either taught them at school (where, in many cases, they’re not even taught anymore!) and have forgotten them, or we actually never learned. We therefore tend to think of political negotiation as a fight between competing opinions, rather than a process by which we all work toward a higher realization of principles on which we already agree.

Our First Principles stand outside of time, providing a stillness that keeps our nation centered through the centrifugal tides of historical change. Referring back to them collectively is an exercise of democratic authority. We have allowed the stresses and merchandising of modern life to lure our attention toward lesser things, creating a crisis in American democracy.

The First Principles are our tools; every citizen needs to have them in his or her mental pocket. You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand them; James Madison was the leading spirit among those who wrote the Constitution, and he was not a lawyer. You don’t have to be a college graduate; George Washington was not a college graduate. You don’t have to be a so-called expert to have a valid opinion. You don’t have to be anything but a citizen to be the source of power in the United States. In fact, that’s the entire point of our power: that it belongs to “We, the People.”

These principles are planted firmly in the soil of human conscience, and they are important for their spiritual as well as political significance. They hold power not only for us but also for people throughout the world, because they reflect the tenets of a higher law. Hearts around the world have hearkened to these principles, from French Revolutionaries in the eighteenth century to Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square.

And yet, for this country, only one thing matters: do our hearts hearken to them now?

I once said to my then six-year-old daughter, an avid Barbie fan, “Darling, Barbie looks anorexic. Someone with a body like that would be in the hospital with a very bad disease. Her hair is stupid and her values are questionable. Do you think she ever does any charity work?” My daughter looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Mommy, I love who I love. I’m not going to change my thoughts.” I gulped. I didn’t agree with my child’s opinion, but I was glad she was so quick to defend her right to have one. You’re never too young to learn that you have the right to your opinions, and to your freedom to express them.

You’re also never too old to make sure that no one ever, ever gets away with compromising that freedom, as long as you’re around.

PRINCIPLE 1: EQUALITY OF RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITY: That all of us are equal before God and should be treated that way by the American government.

The higher point of our equality as Americans is not just that it reflects our Founders’ thoughts but that it also reflects God’s thoughts. To commit to equality is to align with the will of God, that we should love each other as He loves us.

The wording of the Declaration of Independence is as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This principle is easy to take for granted, until we remember exactly what it means. It means that in this country, it is not the circumstances of our birth, but the fact that we are American, that determines our rights and opportunities to pursue happiness. Note that the Declaration says it is the responsibility of government to secure those rights.

James Madison, the father of our Constitution, wrote, “Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives?” His response defined the ideal meaning of equality in America: “Not the rich more than the poor; not the learned more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune.”

The ideal of equality, and our progress toward its full manifestation, is central to American democracy. Regarding both rights and opportunities, equality as a first principle is seriously threatened in America today—yet the threat is largely underestimated. It is couched in words that imply we take equality for granted here, that of course we all believe in it, and therefore we need not be vigilant on its behalf.

Routinely today, however, this first principle is made to stand second or third in line. Yes, we have made strides—in civil rights, women’s rights, and so on—but no, this is not the time to relax. Those with money today have become, in reality though not in principle, more “equal” than anyone else.

Corporate welfare (tax subsidies to our wealthiest corporations) increases to the tune of billions of dollars, while programs that support the health and well-being of our own children are obliterated or turned over to already overburdened private charities. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr: “If they give it to the rich, they “call it a subsidy; if they give it to the poor, they call it a handout.” The American public is being asked to acquiesce in an unethical arrangement whereby we withdraw support from poor children to make sure that the children of parents more well off are taken care of in an even more privileged fashion. If we believe in the principle of equality, then the rich should not be granted greater opportunity than the poor.

Every time we take support away from nutritional, medical, educational, or job training and creation programs that benefit those who need them most—then give tax breaks or corporate subsidies to the far more privileged—we are attacking the first principle of equality in America. Yet that is the basic trend in American government today.

The most dramatic form of inequality in America now is economic inequality. The gap between rich and poor has been steadily increasing in this country for more than twenty years. In the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Thomas Jefferson said that we must endlessly struggle for, and never be complacent until we have achieved, equal opportunity for modest prosperity and equal treatment before the law of every American citizen. And economic inequality extends its unjust influence: criminal justice, for instance, is statistically biased in the United States. If you’re poor in America today, your chances for justice are far less than if you’re rich.

Where there is little adequate education—as in the inner cities of America—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there is little adequate health care—as among America’s poor and even some of our middle class—there is no equality of actual opportunity. Where there are very few opportunities for true professional advancement—as is also true among America’s poor—there is no equality of actual opportunity.

Many issues look different when seen through the lens of the first principle of equality—universal health care, education, and criminal justice, to name a few. The fear-based thinking of the world gives emphasis to our differences, and thus our separation. Such thinking diminishes our commitment to equality; the right of any American is the right of every law-abiding American.

It’s impossible to appreciate that our rights matter, without appreciating that our personhood matters. Every person matters; in that single thought lies the moral authority of American democracy. Our rights to free public education, free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, and free association among ourselves—all of these freedoms exist to create and maintain our equality as citizens.

It is very important that we teach our children what this means, and why it matters. Our rights matter because people matter. No one is supposed to get to tell you what you can do or say in the United States, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Anyone who understands history, or current world affairs, knows what an awesome blessing this is, and what gratitude we owe those who have given their lives to secure it, that we can assume in this country even minimum compliance to the principle of equality. Throughout the world, there are people living in fear that they might “disappear” if something they say or do offends the official order. Women in Afghanistan today, in areas still under Taliban control, risk torture or death if they even wear the wrong clothes. The principle of equality is a very, very serious issue indeed.

Our equality before the law, theoretically, is not up for discussion. It is the birthright of every American; it is a given. But just because something is encoded in law doesn’t mean we can take for granted its constant enforcement. The only way a legal principle remains safe is if it remains alive in our hearts. We must be ever vigilant that the law, and the principles which uphold it, are not compromised while we’re not looking. To think otherwise is not “being positive,” but childish.

Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say that he was not going to Washington to ask for rights for black Americans, but to demand the rights they had been given already. To threaten anyone’s liberty is to threaten everyone’s liberty. As my father used to say, “What they can do to anyone, they can one day do to you.

The political question, for instance, should not be, “What do you think of LGBTQ people?” but rather, “Do we or do we not remain committed to the principle of equality for all, and how does that principle apply to the quest for LGBTQ rights?” Whether someone in America likes someone else in America is irrelevant to what both of their rights should be before the law. The only way we can be vigilant on behalf of our children’s freedom is if we are vigilant on behalf of everyone’s freedom.

In the words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned by the Nazis for eight years because he spoke out against Hitler, “First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

PRINCIPLE 2: E PLURIBUS UNUM: That within our diversity lies a national unity—that we are at the same time a people who reflect and embody diversity, yet are united in our fealty to these treasured First Principles.

Our Founders were students, directly and indirectly, of a wide-ranging body of ideas and information. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were careful and respectful students, for instance, of the government and politics of the Iroquois Confederation and other Native American peoples.

In the Iroquois Indian Confederacy, different Native American tribes retained their individuality yet created a common network for the sake of progress and mutual protection. In that sense, they were progenitors of our republic. They were different, yet in certain ways they were one. Echoes of that governmental philosophy can be found in America’s first principle called E Pluribus Unum, or “Unity in Diversity.”

There are people in America who emphasize our unity yet fail to appreciate our diversity, just as there are those who emphasize our diversity yet fail to appreciate our unity. It is important to honor both. It is our unity and our “diversity that matter, and their relationship to each other reflects a philosophical and political truth that democracy requires.

Unity and diversity are not adversarial, but rather complementary elements in American society. Both make us better. We are woven from many diverse threads, yet we make one piece of fabric; we are many and one at once. You’re Catholic and you’re an American; you’re gay and you’re an American; you’re black and you’re an American. Neither identity is to be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

When the country was founded, our diversity was determined mainly by our geographical dimension. Massachusetts was very different from the Carolinas; they remained true to their individual identities while at the same time forging one American culture. Our statehood now is less a critical geographical concept than an ideological one; our ethnicity, beliefs, and economics define our differing “states” today. We are different colors, different religions, different beliefs, and different cultures. Yet we are united in our fealty to these common principles. It is not our weakness, but in fact our strength, that we are represented in this country by citizens from literally every other nation of the world. Our power lies not in excluding each other but in including each other, not only legally but also emotionally and spiritually. We are all Americans, and we are involved in a great experiment together. No group of Americans are the “normal” Americans, no group of Americans monopolize truth or wisdom or righteousness, and no group of Americans deserve more or less protection or opportunity from the American government.

“It is when we have a healthy experience of our individual identity, that we can then most easily accept sharing a larger one. But that first step cannot be skipped; it’s wrong to expect someone to play down his or her religious or racial identity in service to a larger identity until he or she has first been shown honor for what that individual identity is. I’ll stop going on and on about being a woman once I feel you respect me as one. At that point—once “we have all been acknowledged as individually significant—it’s important that we turn our attention to the betterment and preservation of the nation we all share.”

Unity in diversity is a principle demanding our personal maturity. We must develop the ability to tolerate the creative chaos of many voices and opinions all expressing themselves at once; to not seek control over the thoughts or behaviors of others just because they are different from us; and to listen with respect and recognize the dignity of those with whom we disagree. It is not a First Principle in America that any one group gets to be right. It is a First Principle that each of us, and each of the diverse cultures living together here, has valuable things to say and to contribute. Allowing everyone to do so is central to our liberty, our genius, and our progress toward a greater good.

As children of God, it’s not just our equal rights that should be stressed but our equal brilliance as well. During the spring of 1998, I was invited to speak at a gathering hosted by the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in Memphis, Tennessee. The event was called a Unity Banquet, held as part of the celebration of a Season for Nonviolence, in which eight different local ethnic groups shared some unique expression of their own cultures—dance, song, clothing, food, and so on. Young Muslim women did a magnificent performance piece, Mexican women modeled dresses from their native communities, small Chinese children gave a martial arts demonstration, Ukrainians shared ethnic foods, and the like. Before the event, I had no conscious prejudice against any of those groups. But neither had I the deeply profound respect and admiration for their cultures that I gained that day. I had never before been moved to tears by their unique contributions to the human spirit.

“James Madison once said that “tolerance is not enough” because, psychologically, tolerance still implies judgment. In order to experience the highest possibilities of American culture, the social fruition of the ideal of E Pluribus Unum, we will need to do more than merely tolerate each other. America won’t fulfill its most noble dream until we actually come to admire each other for the glorious characteristics of our uniquely individual ethnic identities. It is only when we have come to the point where we genuinely bless each other’s children, and recognize their potential brilliance, that we will be on the path to the possible America.

There are many people in America today who “tolerate” others through clenched teeth, who “respectfully disagree” with a look that is chilling. Their look seems to say, “Until we take over, I accept that we haven’t yet.” America belongs to all of us. Equality means that none of us is inherently more valuable than anyone else. Freedom means that we actually like it that way.

PRINCIPLE 3: BALANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND PROTECTION OF THE COMMON GOOD: That it is the responsibility of government to protect the general welfare, yet with enough checks and balances

America ideally seeks to balance the needs of the individual with an appreciation of our common good. This principle is central to our greatest achievements, but also to our greatest political battles.

Sometimes we’re appalled because the government is getting into our business and we think it should keep its nose out; other times we’re appalled because we feel the government hasn’t adequately taken care of the collective good. When American politics is at its best, we create a healthy balance between the two.

Yes, it’s true that we should protect the environment and the children, our most precious resources—but yes, it’s also true that an individual should be free to pursue his or her own economic goals with as little interference or obstruction as possible. Yes, it’s true that law enforcement officials should have the necessary power to protect us—but yes, it’s also true that the individual should be protected from too much police or governmental interference. Collective welfare versus individual rights; this is the dynamic tension underlying most political debate today, and it’s amazing how passionate we get when we’re revved up about one or the other.

Don’t you dare try to take away my right to own a gun” versus “Can’t the government get all these guns off the street?” “How dare the government tell me how to regulate my business” versus “Why won’t the government protect us from the chemicals in that pesticide?” What so often shows up as violent competition becomes, when we truly learn to listen to each other, the stuff of creative synergy. Freedom doesn’t mean we will always agree; it means we all have important points of view to contribute to the mix.

President Eisenhower once said that the American mind at its best is both conservative and liberal. We need to conserve those things that are eternally true and still retain the ability to respond liberally and spontaneously to the immediate demands of our time. What’s so lacking in American politics today is people showing adequate respect for those who disagree with them. An intelligent person can understand that both individual and collective rights are important to the nation. Depending on the issue, liberals and conservatives stress different sides of the equation.

A true liberal doesn’t think government can fix all our problems, and a true conservative doesn’t believe that whatever is good for corporate America is always good for Americans. Yet there are many on both sides of our political debate who would stereotype their adversaries as thinking that way. What is lacking, obviously, is a dignified, civilized center. We have too little “golden mean” in politics today. Somebody is always pointing a finger, it seems, saying “He,” “She,” or “They” are the enemies of America, when in truth, our greatest enemy is that pointed finger.

After the hardest-fought presidential election of his time, Thomas Jefferson reminded his countrymen, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Civic life in America should include vigorous debate between liberals and conservatives as well as everyone else; that is democracy in action. But the debate must remain within the bounds of mutual respect and dignity or our civil life is no longer civil. Those who view political debate as merely “your needs and desires versus my needs and desires”—with no respect for America’s need to balance individual liberty with the common good—bring down the political process.

Individual liberty matters as well as the collective good. I’m as guilty as the next person of giving in to anger when I feel strongly about an issue and someone else either doesn’t share my passion, or works to thwart the goals I feel are important. In the Preamble to the Constitution, it says, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” To me, “promoting the general welfare” includes the care and protection of America’s children.

I’m passionate about the fact that one-fifth of America’s children live in poverty, that millions of our children go to schools in which there aren’t even working toilets, in slums where the social and economic conditions are as dire as during the worst days of the Great Depression. In many cases, these kids are living with circumstances as desperate as any war zone, daily dodging bullets; meanwhile, Congress gives more and more economic largess to the richest among us while failing to provide food support, universal health care, access to higher education, adequate job-training programs, small-business loans, or other resources to millions who need such things to lift themselves out of poverty. To add to that, the funneling of our material resources ever more consistently in the direction of those who already have them is often couched cynically and insidiously in terms of service to the American people.

But as passionately as I feel about those things, I also know this: as outraged as we might be at the sight of injustice, we must remain equally excited by the possibilities for a better world that lie on the other side of it. In God, all things are possible. The enlightened activist is fueled by the faith that another kind of world is reachable, and that it is the purpose of our lives to bring it forth. That, to me, is the American Dream.

Optimism is an essential part of the American character; out of it we were born, and only with it shall we repair. Our national soul depends upon it. We must not allow cynicism or anger to warp us. As long as I’m working against something I hate instead of for something I love, I’m of the old and not the new. The politics of a healed America is a love for what could be and a reach for the possible.

And none of us has a monopoly on truth. It’s hard at times to develop a nonviolent, loving, and respectful attitude toward our political adversaries, but anything less keeps us stuck on the political wheel of suffering. Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote, “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.” I’ll write that out and put it on my bathroom mirror, if you’ll write it out and put it on yours.

PRINCIPLE 4: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: That every American shall worship how he or she wishes, if he or she wishes, according to the individual’s own conscience and with no governmental interference in that right.

The separation of Church and State was not meant to religiously constrict us, but rather to religiously free us. We were all taught as children that early Americans came to this country fleeing religious persecution, committed to the creation of a society in which no one could be told by the government either how to worship or even whether to worship. And neither would their new government be constricted in any way by an official religious dogma. Both government and religion are thereby protected from interference by the other. A thick line between Church and State keeps our religious lives free of any government pressure and our government free of religious pressure. It is an enlightened and enlightening concept.

Our Founders did not seek to block the religious path but rather to free it of all obstruction. They recognized that religious dogma can be as detrimental to the human spirit as political dogma, and can often be used to restrict the rights of others. That was not to be allowed in the United States. Our Founders themselves were men of spiri“tual conviction, though many of them would be hard pressed to meet the standard of what some people call religious today. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He recognized religious tyranny to be as oppressive as any other.”

But separating the State from the undue influence of religious institutions was in no way meant by our Founders to be an impediment to the search for higher truth, within the individual or within society. They embraced the Creator while refusing to pay homage to specific dogmas claiming to monopolize religious truth. That stance was in support, not rejection, of the true religious experience. The separation of Church and State was intended to support our spiritual flowering by guaranteeing its freedom.

Spirituality, to many of us, is as important to the soul as is oxygen to the body. Without it, the world can make sense to the mind but it can never make sense to the heart. But the spirit is an internal phenomenon, and civilization has always suffered when any particular dogma or doctrine has sought to impose itself upon the peoples of the world. The highest, most spirit-filled religious consciousness is a living water, and that water is poured into the world not through religious doctrine but through the human heart. Love itself is the highest religious experience. No religion has a monopoly on God because religion itself has no monopoly on God. God is looking to us for more than words alone; He is looking for our forgiveness, mercy, and love. Ecclesiastical, orthodox religious systems are not the only arbiters of spiritual force. They are not the only spiritual guides. We will not be renewed by a worldly religious authority, but by the spirit of love at the heart of all the great religious traditions.

Religious freedom, as an American first principle, means no one in America has a right to monopolize the religious discussion. Even today, people throughout the world face torture and murder for not seeing God the way someone else does. It is one of the cornerstones of American liberty that we make a stand for religious freedom. Jefferson wrote, “Toleration is not enough. What we need is liberty, fully protected by the law, to believe or not “believe as you see fit.” America was not founded to protect the definition of God as proposed by any one group or individual; it was founded to protect our liberty to think however we wish to think.”

We must not indulge any group of Americans who seek to ban other people’s conception of spirituality from the public sphere on the basis that “it is not of God,” when in fact it simply isn’t in line with their conception of God. We are not a Christian nation. We are not a Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu nation. We are not a Buddhist, Sufi, Baha’i, or any other officially religious nation. We are not an atheistic nation. We are a religiously pluralistic society in which one’s freedom to worship as he or she wishes, or not to worship at all, is fully protected by law. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Obviously, the principle of religious freedom is as relevant to our politics today as it was over two hundred years ago. Such issues are never truly put to bed; they simply come around again and again until human consciousness has evolved to the point where they are no longer an issue at all. As Americans, we have the blessing of our First Principles to guide us at times such as these, to give us the moral authority, the courage and conviction, to make a stand for our essential freedom at times, like this one, when forces are arrayed against them.

THERE ARE THOSE in America today who seem to distrust the mechanics of liberty. Democracy is indeed a radical proposition. It is posited on the notion that each of us, from the depth of our own wisdom, brings to society the unique and precious gift of our own viewpoint and experience. We do not, and will not, always see things the same way; that is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Nowhere does this hold true more than in the area of religion.

In making a basic study of comparative religion—reading such books, for instance, as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions—we see the universality of basic religious themes. Throughout the world, from Ireland to Bosnia to the Middle East, and increasingly in the United States, violence comes from fear born of ignorance of another’s religious viewpoint. There is one God, and one God only. He pours Himself into many vessels, expressing His Truth in many ways, but still His Truth is one. And that Truth is love.

Religious pluralism is a most crucial issue in the world today. We should be learning more about our own religious traditions and the traditions of our fellows. In this way we will come to know the unity in our religious diversity, without which we cannot appreciate the full genius of our American system of government or the greater glory of God.

RELIGION CAN BE a confusing concept. The word itself comes from a root that means “to bind back.” The actual religious experience is a “binding back” of our hearts to the truth within. An example of a spiritually based political force in America was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although emanating from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, its call reached not only Christians but all people of goodwill, for its message was one of brotherhood and nonviolence. That’s what made it so radical and also so purely religious. King’s goal of achieving the “beloved community” is a vision at the heart of not one but all religious faiths.

There is an important distinction to be made between a religiously based and a spiritually based political impulse. While religion is a force that either creatively or noncreatively separates us, spirituality is a force that unites us by reminding us of our fundamental oneness. The religionization of American politics is dangerous; the spiritualization of our political consciousness is imperative.

When violence erupted in Israel in September of 1996 over the Israeli opening of a tunnel near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the clear difference between religious dogma and spiritual passion was obvious. For three of the great religions of the world, this particular piece of land is holy: Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from there, the Jews believe that it is the spot from which God created the universe, and the Christians hold that Christ walked past there on his way to the cross. While a strictly exoteric religious perspective tempts us to compete for land, a genuine spiritual experience joins our hearts.

The authentic teachings of all the great religious perspectives reveal that it is not land that matters but love itself. God’s call is not that we build His temple on a particular piece of land, but in our hearts. This is where the Rock is.

Many people in the world today use religion to divide us. They cite a particular book, whether the Bible, the Koran, or any other religious text, and claim that herein lies a universal prescription for all human behavior. Such fundamentalist mentality is more about God than of God, and the distinction between the two is one of the most important issues in world affairs today.

Of the People, By the People, For the People

America’s First Principles are inscribed not only in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution but also in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg that “this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What a radical concept that is—a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It means, of course, that not only will the government consist of our citizens, elected by our citizens, but that its mission shall be to serve our citizens.

We should take a good look at that sentence—especially the part that reads “for the people”—and ask ourselves if we have decided to be the generation to repudiate Lincoln’s words. President Rutherford B. Hayes once lamented that we were becoming a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.”

If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t all our children receive the best education in the world? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have universal health insurance? If ours were a government for the people, wouldn’t we have massively committed to a green economy by now? What has happened to us, that so many have been lured into believing what’s good for huge corporate forces is inherently what’s good for us? And what’s happened to the rest of us, that we at times so weakly resist?

America’s most fundamental problem is a crisis of our democratic process. We are being asked, as we were asked over two hundred years ago, to decide for ourselves and our children what it is worth to us to govern ourselves. While it appears that we have problems very different from those faced by earlier generations, in fact it is not the complexity of our current problems but rather the simple drama behind them all that should be garnering our attention. What we call the issues are not the issue. The issue is the disengagement of the average American’s heart and mind from the democratic process. We have stopped participating in droves, and in our absence, forces not always in favor of the greatest good for the greatest number have exercised their own rights, often leaving the average American at a distinct disadvantage in our own country.

The greatest issue that confronts us now, as it has confronted every generation to some degree, is this: Is America to be ruled by all of us and for all of us—or has the American government in fact become a government of, by, and for a relative few?

A mean group of selfish people did not just decide to steal America; what happened is that we gave her away. We were not vigilant on behalf of our own good. We failed to make periodic recourse to First Principles, allowing ourselves the disempowerment of ignorance and distraction. We turned our eyes away from things that, in a free and democratic society, the citizenry cannot afford to turn our eyes away from. And now we are in a crisis of democracy that could easily have been predicted; in fact, with the first publication of this book, it was.

Yet what we chose to ignore before, we can choose to look at now. Let us look with courage and conviction at the principles that alone not only make us great, but also make us free. Our Founders strove to overthrow the very notion of aristocracy, creating a system in which anyone could rise according to his or her own abilities, talents, and efforts. What they strove for then, we must strive for now. Jefferson thought democracy was humanity’s best antidote for what he referred to as the “general prey of the rich on the poor”—rebellion against which he considered natural and good. And what his generation rebelled against in their time, we must rebel against in ours.

In a society where selfishness and greed have become the accepted ethos, a commitment to social justice is a rebellious mode of being. We now need more, not less, of the Jeffersonian spirit of true rebellion. While a market-obsessed corporate mentality lords over us like a new ruling class, we act more like royalists than like our own Revolutionary forebears. This time we are not being assaulted directly, as the colonists were by the English through endless taxes and other burdens, but rather through an endless dripping stream of pleasure that the system is able to provide us, much like a low-grade morphine pump pushed into our veins, making us think we can’t live without it. Pleasure can be used to enslave a person as effectively as pain.

Let us not be so addicted to the pure adrenaline rush of contemporary culture that we fail to rebel against the erosion of our democracy. Let this moment of awakening, despite the pain that it renders, be a moment of national renewal.

We cannot dream the American Dream as long as we are sleeping. In order to dream the American Dream, the dreamer must be passionately, powerfully, consciously awake.

Chapter 3 will be emailed tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Chapter 1: Mystical Power

Chapter 1
MYSTICAL POWER

Politics has become the active involvement of an increasingly smaller subset of the American people. Out of 163 democracies in the world, we reportedly rank among the lowest in democratic participation. Instead of a broad-based citizen involvement, politics has become more of a spectator sport—a separate activity in which only some among us participate. This is hardly the sign of a healthy democracy. People have disengaged from the democratic process for many reasons, not the least of which is that the average person seems to feel that his or her personal involvement doesn’t really make much difference. And those who for that reason no longer vote—who to the casual observer might seem not to care, who feel that there is no point in trying because some powerful elite has it all sewn up—are increasingly correct in their assessment.

Cynics have a point, after all. One look at the evening news, and it’s clear that politics has become more of a mean-spirited pursuit than a noble pursuit; the will of the people seems not to be the driving force of American policy; the general welfare of the people is arguably not the primary motivation of most governmental behavior. But if the American people don’t take our government back, re-engaging a process we have chosen to ignore for a while, then we have no right to complain about those who would take it over in our absence. Those who can see what’s wrong with the process are the last ones who should be sitting it out.

Yet where does one start? Many of us haven’t been involved in political action for the last ten or twenty years, or more. Most Americans are so stressed out just trying to survive. The economic tension that pervades most American households—quite contrary to all the official protestations that the economy today is so good (yes, good for a few, obviously, but not good for the many)—makes cynicism about politics seem reasonable. People have had it with the government. It’s not that we’re apathetic about our country, but merely that we’re disgusted with politics today. It’s obviously a corrupt and sullied process, and how can fresh flowers grow in dirty water? That is what we need to find out.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WROTE to James Madison in 1787, “I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Healthy rebellion is not a negative emotion, but rather a politically legitimate expression of justified dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied people are often dissatisfied for a reason, and where we have no taste for rebellion, we have no taste for freedom.

If we do not rebel in some way against conditions that arouse our anger, then often the anger turns inward, becoming depression or even physical illness. Failing to question the root of the anger, our standard response these days is to merely mask the pain. And the same system that we might otherwise be angry at has myriad ways of turning our pain into a profit center. There is nothing serene or transcendent about allowing ourselves to be distracted from looking at the rot now permeating our democratic system; to do so is essentially a slave mentality.

So what, then, are we to do with our anger? All anger stems from a sense of limited freedom—freedom to be, to say, to feel, to do. In the United States particularly, people unconsciously rebel against restrictions on our freedom because we are aware this is supposedly the land of the free. Yet whether our anger and resentment is funneled through Right-wing or Left-wing politics, anger is a low-level energy that ultimately re-creates the conditions that fueled it to begin with. The enlightened activist is looking to love, not to anger, to solve the problem. And that is our task at this time.

So what would love do now, if called in to help us? Would, it transform the anger? Yes. Would it lead to destructive behavior? No. Would it lead to rebellion? Yes, in a way. It would lead to “divine rebellion. To nonviolent revolution. To the complete transformation of how we live with ourselves and how we live with each other. To a re-envisioning of the entire world.

This is the time, and this is the place. The twenty-first century. A new America . . . or else, just more of the same.

“DURING THE 1960S, America experienced its last rebellious generation. I was there, and much of what is happening today harkens back to that.

During that decade, people were politically engaged, taking to the streets to express our deepest passions about this country and its behavior. As with protestors who took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Women’s March or the March for Our Lives, their energy created an electricity that affected the entire culture.

Yet the rebellious generation of the 1960s was ultimately quieted. For something happened then to take us off the streets and to keep us off. That something was violent threat and collective trauma, perpetrated on one generation and bequeathed to each one since as a legacy of those times.”

The baby boomers were young at that time, and the young respond to dreams and visions. Those who carried aloft the most eloquent visions of a possible America during the 1960s were literally shot and killed in front of the eyes of the young who so adored them. For my generation, carrying a brilliant dream of a noble collective future meant putting oneself in the line of fire. From President Kennedy, to his brother Bobby, to Dr. King, to the students at Kent State, the primary articulators of positive change, of dreams for our democracy in this stunning age, were permanently silenced—and the bullets that shot them psychically struck us all. Millions of us became in many ways like the son of Robert Kennedy, who having watched his father murdered on television, got stoned and never recovered.

The invisible order that shot our heroes did not keep shooting, but began providing goods and services as quickly as possible to distract a grieving generation from our psychic pain. They did not leave us out of their conception of what America should be; quite to the contrary, they used us as their fodder, luring us into their planned environment of endless material consumption. We have been relatively quiet about anything meaningful ever since. Our leaders assassinated, our ranks dispersed, our generation received loud instructions: go home now, scatter, go to your rooms, and enjoy yourselves with all the toys we sell you.

We received a loud, silent message from those assassinations, an unconscious imprint that has become what psychologists call a “sponsoring belief” for an entire generation: “You can do pretty much whatever you want within the private sector. You will still be free, of course—to buy the red one or buy the blue one. But leave the public sector alone.” And no one had to say what sentence comes next: “Or we might kill you, too.”

And so we did what we were told to do, and taught our children to do the same. We poured our prodigious talents and indisputable genius into the private domain. We left the public sector, which is essentially the political sector, to those—whoever they were—who wanted it so much that they were willing to go to such lengths to control it.

And thus we became a class of rich slaves. Our fear that what had happened to our slain leaders might happen to us, our naïve and immature preoccupation with drugs, and ultimately our complete seduction by a consumer society conspired to turn us into the greatest fuel source for the status quo that America has ever seen. Given our previous, youthful repudiation of the downside of American materialism, the irony here is almost grotesque. We who sought to heal America once before have helped to run her into the ground.

We have countenanced the undermining of our political system; we have tolerated the widening gap between rich and poor in America to levels deemed unsustainable by serious economic indicators; we have sold the health and welfare of our children and our environment to the highest bidders. Like Esau in the Book of Genesis, we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. Even more important, perhaps, we were so stoned on our very way of life, so distanced from our own authentic human knowing, that we hardly seemed to realize what a black hole these things were forming in our national soul.

With every generation since the Sixties until now, Americans became more cynical, weary of politics, and too tired to dissent. Our frantic productivity created the illusion of functionality, and as producers and consumers, certainly we were as active as ever. But as citizens we became anemic, not so much energized as propped up by artificial highs. Behind all manner of false merriment lay a river of pharmaceutical and other efforts to buffer us from our legitimate pain. We told ourselves these were the best of times, but in many ways we were slowly becoming collectively depressed. The children of God have not been shining our lights at anything close to full wattage.

The baby-boomer generation became like a logjam in the river of American history; as long as we were psychologically stuck, everyone behind us remained somewhat stuck as well. We were born to proclaim that a better world is possible, yet then were warned that to do so is not a good idea. We were thus distracted from our spiritual mission. We are not separate but one, and we long, at the deepest level of our being, to gift each other with our internal abundance, not manipulate each other for mere external gain.

We disengaged from politics after the 1960s because of a blow to our essential selves, and in the absence of that engagement, power was usurped by the interests of a relative few. This was, and is, a spiritual crisis first and a political crisis second. America’s real problem is our fear to express ourselves. Fear to be who we were born to be, and fear to do what we most long to do. We do not break through that fear by further disengagement. We break through the fear by embracing love.

What we longed for before, and what we long for now, is to love each other. And that is what the heroes of the Sixties were saying. Looking back at the speeches of Dr. King or Robert Kennedy, one is struck by both the genius and the tragedy of their lives. They did not just say, “Let a man love his wife, or parents love their children.” They said, “Let us love all life.” That is what made them so dangerous to the status quo. For that they lived, and for that they died. They pointed to the next step in America’s moral evolution—the expansion of our compassion—and that is a step that by definition repudiates oppression and injustice.

Those of us who were young when our older heroes were murdered then aged ourselves. We sometimes ask ourselves, “What will I say to myself on my deathbed? Will I know that I did what I came to earth to do?” And the answers don’t always please us. For millions of people today, the thought that we might die knowing in our hearts that we didn’t really do what we came here to do is actually scarier than the thought that they might kill us if we do. Secrets still lurk regarding the political assassinations of the 1960s and they continue to haunt our collective psyche. But we have processed much in the years since.

The baby-boomer generation finally matured emotionally. We grieved, and we began to heal. Younger generations now contribute their own unique drama and genius to the maelstrom of American society. There is a window of opportunity now for Americans to reclaim lost ground.

There is new possibility in the air today, a miraculous awakening and a change in the way we live our lives. It is a spiritual renaissance with social and political implications. Restoration and hope appear all over, as a rising environmental, community, and spiritual consciousness resurrects the dreams of former times. Civic brotherhood is beginning, in many places, to replace the false gods of self-centeredness and greed. There is a yearning among us to make right the world.

Will this become a broad-scale social force for good or merely isolated cases of cultural sanity? An America intending to heal itself will unscramble the information from which we have been systematically distracted for years, atone for and grieve our national errors, and consciously restore the political process to its role as an enlightened tool. It will take a miracle to do this, but miracles are always at issue in any great movement of history. Was not the American Revolution a miracle? Was not Indian independence from Britain a miracle? Are not miracles what our hearts most long for now?

Out of the ashes rises the phoenix. It has been almost half a century since the end of the Sixties, and Americans are again taking a deeper look at societal issues. Yet many are doing so through the filter of a higher awareness, unshackled by the mechanistic prejudices of the twentieth century.

There is darkness without; but no darkness, limitation, illusion, or fear can stand before the force of uplifted consciousness. Perhaps we are set to embark on a new chapter in our evolution as a nation, rededicating ourselves to the transcendental nature of democracy, declaring en masse our intention to have it rise at last to the level of its true potential.

“We have in our hearts,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “a power more powerful than bullets.” It is time for us to use that power now, to free our nation and to free ourselves. Mystical power is the greatest power, in politics and in life. It reveals to us that bodies die but ideas do not, as long as people’s hearts embrace them. It is time to resurrect the ideas that truly make this nation great.

“I ONCE SAID to a friend of mine, another author who writes on spiritual subjects, “We really should be addressing political issues.”

“Yeah,” he responded, “I think you’re right.”

Then a pause, an angst-ridden silence.

But there’s only one problem,” he said. “I really hate politics.”

It’s a conundrum: we don’t want anything to do with politics because it’s such a dirty business, yet turning away from it altogether has gotten us where we are today. Anyone who looks at the last few years and still says things like “It doesn’t really matter who we vote for” is living on an alternative planet.

Many people would love to feel that politics can be a high-minded effort, but it’s hard to see how, in today’s political climate. Particularly when looked at from a spiritual perspective, political involvement seems tawdry and low. It’s the last place any of us look anymore for hope or inspiration.

“I just want spirituality in my life,” a friend said to me recently. “None of that other stuff matters to me.”

And yet, what is spirituality? Is it just another compartment in our lives, like relationships, career, money, or health? Or is it something all-inclusive—the soul’s oxygen, the life-giving agent meant to grace and revitalize all of life? If spirituality is relevant to anything, then it is relevant to everything. How can we speak seriously of a God who cares what happens to you and me, but somehow would not have us care about what happens to each other?

So how do we make spirituality relevant to politics? Ten years ago, if I asked that question, I would receive answers such as these:

• From political types, that “Spirituality is not relevant to politics. Don’t start with all that spiritual stuff. It has nothing to do with politics. Politics is about the real world.”

• From spiritual types, that “Spirituality makes politics irrelevant. Think about more positive things. Politics is just a low-level, addictive power game. Forget it. Real change can’t come from there.

But such voices have begun to give way to a more spiritually sophisticated perspective. Just as the Sixties generation sought a blend of political and philosophical relevance, so a new generation is doing the same. It’s popular in some circles today to say, “Face it—the Sixties didn’t work.” But in many ways it did work (we ended a war, among other things), not the least of which is the permanent mark it left on the souls of so many of us still here, still kicking, and ready to once again take up the mantle of enlightened activism. For millions of Americans whose souls were branded forever by the magic of that time, to say it didn’t work is a rather obvious attempt to kill whatever remnants of its audacious spirit might still remain alive.

To blend love and politics is indeed audacious. Politics is a fear-based pursuit in America today, and love is the only thing that fear fears. Love is the ultimate political rebellion. During the 1960s, love and politics were uttered in the same breath and sung in the same song. “All You Need Is Love” was a song we sang at political rallies.

We have not forgotten that, so much as we have lived with the wound that was left on our hearts when the music died. For by the mid-Seventies, the paths of love and politics diverged. They would no longer seem even distantly related. Many who stayed interested in politics would come to trivialize the consciousness movement, and many of those interested in consciousness would start to ignore politics. Both sides then tended to smugly, self-righteously dismiss the other as irrelevant, thinking that they and they alone knew what it takes to change the world.

The consciousness movement concerns itself with addressing the causal level of events. All things in the outer world are reflections, or effects, of consciousness; mere changes in external conditions are thus seen as temporary palliatives, at best, for the problems of the world. Enlightened laws can be passed, but then repealed. Only when the mind has itself transformed does the world achieve any permanent change. The search for higher consciousness is the effort to attain a level of mind from whence only peace can flow, and in the presence of which only peace can exist.

Those interested in traditional politics, on the other hand, are primarily focused on the world of effects. They argue that we cannot afford to just sit around meditating while so much human suffering goes unchecked. They use the means of the material world to solve the problems of the material world, and are apt to see the issues of enlightenment as airy-fairy when applied to politics.

Those interested in traditional politics, on the other hand, are primarily focused on the world of effects. They argue that we cannot afford to just sit around meditating while so much human suffering goes unchecked. They use the means of the material world to solve the problems of the material world, and are apt to see the issues of enlightenment as airy-fairy when applied to politics.

Today, it is the remarriage of our philosophical and political passions that holds the key to our political renewal. It is not either/or, but both—both cause and effect, mind and body—that need addressing in order to create a positive, effective politics for the twenty-first century. It is the political process itself that lacks, and that is because neither our hearts nor our higher minds are currently particularly active there. We need to re-create politics now as a mystical pursuit, bringing our souls to bear on the effort to make the world a better place.

And that is what is happening now. Many political types are saying, “Maybe politics really does need some deeper roots, some way to get past all the hatred,” and spiritual types are saying, “We need to extend the principles of enlightenment into social and political realms.”

From the early American Quakers to Henry David Thoreau, to Mahatma Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., the effort to bridge the inner-outer duality has been one of the high points of human philosophy and endeavor. America has been fertile ground for such philosophy since our earliest days. It is the message that our spiritual and political evolution are not separate, but intimately and potentially even gloriously connected. It’s the suggestion that we can’t give to the world what we have not achieved within ourselves, and we can’t keep for ourselves what we have not yet given to the world. And ultimately, it’s the message that maybe, just maybe, love will someday rule the world.

IN THE MOST advanced stages of ancient Egyptian culture, the pharaoh was not just given his job for life. At regular intervals, he had to prove to his people that he still had what it took to do the job, displaying physical, moral, and mental strengths for all his subjects to witness. Similarly, statues of ancient Egyptian gods were reconsecrated yearly through prayer and rituals, as though it could not be taken for granted that the genuine force within material substance would remain fully active without a regular reassertion of human devotion.

So it is that while Americans still go through the rites of democracy—political campaigns, elections, inaugurations—there is among us the sinking feeling that these rites are losing their spiritual force. Anything, no matter how initially pure, becomes corrupted if it is no longer connected to people’s hearts. And that is how so many of us feel today. Democracy, we know, is still a vital concept—in fact, more so now than ever. But American democracy today is like a beautiful treasure housed in a decrepit building; our democratic principles are too good for our politics.

The state of our politics reflects the state of our humanity. In order to renew our politics, we’re going to have to take a good look at the principles, or lack of them, that underlie our society today. As long as our social order rests on obsolete principles—obsolete because they are spiritually blind—there will be no real breakthrough in our political realities. In the words of Gandhi, “The problem with humanity is that we are not in our right minds.

The principles underlying our social, political, and economic conditions deem us purely material rather than spiritual beings, economics rather than relationship-oriented, and separate bodies rather than united hearts. We view competition as the primary motivator of human creativity, which it certainly is not. We view the creation of wealth as the primary goal of human work, though it should not be. We treat each other as anything but brothers, though that is what we are. These misperceptions of who we are and why we are here are central to the problems of the world. They are illusions holding back the human race, keeping us limited to the lower energies of dense, material-plane consciousness at a time when we are ready to expand to new levels of awareness and joy. In withdrawing our attachment to them, in rejecting their claim on our imaginations, we can transform our experience of life on earth.

A philosophical shift of historical importance is occurring throughout the world. Yes, we know that we are rational beings. Yes, we know that the physical world is based on the laws of science. We also know—or remember at last—that in fact we are spiritual beings, too.

We are each of us divine essence, placed on earth to create the good, the true, and the beautiful. That goal is a compelling force that motivates us to higher heights than any contest or economic stimulus could ever come close to matching. There are within each of us God-given talents that do not respond to market pressure, yet spring to life in the presence of honor and respect. The spirit within compels us to serve each other rather than compete with each other, bless each other rather than condemn each other, and place our primary attention on the extension of brotherly love.

The twenty-first century is a crossroads for the human race. We are living at a time of both intensified fear and intensified love, both encroaching barbarism and spiritual renaissance. Our consciousness now is backed by so much material power that whether it is attuned to fear or attuned to love affects the future of the entire human race.

The spiritual renaissance of our time is like a mystical revolution of human consciousness, a surge of energy from the subconscious of a species that registers threat yet is intent upon survival. Love, like fear, is contagious. Unlike fear, however, love has ultimate authority over the forces of the world. It proceeds in spite of all obstruction. Every day, like the inevitable dawn, more spiritual light seeps into the world.

Awareness of spiritual tenets already colors our philosophical outlook in the new millennium—in time, it will dominate our politics and economics, too. Either love will begin to rule the world, or we will suffer the consequences of continued resistance to the supreme law of the Creator—that we love one another—too long past the point when as a species we knew better. To run counter to love is to run counter to life. One cannot do so forever and survive. That is true for a person and it is true for a nation.

In the 1960s, these words were written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age, with a new structure of freedom and justice.

Now, as we face the fact of this new, emerging world, we must face the responsibilities that come along with it. A new age brings with it new challenges. . . .

First, we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together.

. . Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make of it [a] brotherhood. We are all involved in the single process. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are all links in the great chain of humanity. . . . We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.

The love so many of us would like to see injected into the veins of civilization must first pour into us. Society will not transform until we transform; what’s wrong “out there” is but a mere reflection of what’s wrong “in here.” This is liberating news if we see it that way. Once we recognize that our minds are the causal level of worldly events, then we are free to seek to change the world by changing our thoughts about the world.

Racial tension, decivilization of our cities, violence and drugs among our youth and in our neighborhoods, economic disparity between rich and poor, global strife, threats of terrorism at home and abroad—the most serious problems we face as a nation are not solvable through traditional political means alone, because they are the wounds of an internal disease. To simply imprison more criminals is not going to stop crime; to raise interest rates more or less is not going to make the American economy both abundant and just; and no amount of military might can ultimately control the bonfire of ethnic hatred erupting like wildfire all around the world.

A mere treatment of symptoms is not an adequate response to the diseases that plague us. A more enlightened politics will address the causal issues of our societal functions as well as their effects. We need a nonviolent assumption of the power of the soul to heal the pain of a world that has forgotten it has one.

Internal forces are bubbling up today like volcanoes of spiritual light. Extraordinary technological changes in our society are mere adjuncts to an equally powerful explosion of possibility within the human mind. It is not only the interconnectedness of the Internet but also the interconnectedness of our hearts that offer new and miraculous opportunities to mend the broken pieces of the world.

The bridge to a better world is a shift in mass consciousness, to a part of ourselves we have tended to keep out of the public realm. That part of us is not interested in traditional politics. It is neither a bridge to the past nor a bridge to the future, but a bridge to who we most deeply are.

It is who we are when we are hushed in church, near tears when they blow the shofar on Yom Kippur, honest and vulnerable with our therapist. It is the part of us least acknowledged, maintained, or seemingly even valued at all by the social order we have created around us. It is the part of us that still hopes for miracles and at times can even see them.

That place in each of us is the place of our true power; it is the key to our personal and political salvation. For it is from that inner, sacred place that we genuinely join with others. From elsewhere in the personality we can forge alliances, but we cannot merge. And from joining we emerge truly changed, having fertilized the garden that could yet become our Eden. We turn our backs on our lower natures, allowing the angels to breathe within us.

In every area of human endeavor, we see the reflection of a basic spiritual and psychological principle: where people join, breakthroughs occur. Where we are separate from each other—angry, polarized, and defensive—breakdown and disorder are inevitable. The way to heal social disorder, domestically or internationally, is to find our spiritual oneness. We don’t need deeper analysis of our sicknesses so much as we desperately need a more passionate embrace of the only thing that heals them all.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, America was poised to experience either a rebirth or a catastrophe. We had lost our spiritual rudder, and without it we had neither individual nor collective wisdom. Our culture had lost its sense of sacred connection to any power or authority higher than ourselves. Our national conscience was barely alive as we slithered like snakes across a desert floor toward any hole where money lay. Nothing short of an internal awakening could heal us. Our children were prey to violence more vicious than that of most civilized countries, scientists were already warning of the urgent danger to our biosphere, and millions of Americans could barely contain their rage much longer in the face of continued social and economic injustice. Both major political parties steered the discussion of what truly ailed us away from that which actually does, for they had no context for a higher discussion. They were already more alike than different, and neither any longer home to truly serious political alternatives. They had become a game unto themselves.

On September 11, 2001, that national catastrophe came. The United States has been an injured giant struggling to regain our footing ever since. We have tried Democrats and we have tried Republicans, but something more than what either has come to symbolize is needed now.

Our political salvation will not come from our political system as it now exists. It will come from deep within us.

JUST AS DR. King spoke of the interconnectedness of all beings, we are also more conscious today of the interconnectedness of all aspects of our being. The brokenness of the outer world reflects a brokenness within ourselves.

The awareness of an internal oneness posits the unity of mind, body, and spirit. Mind and body are not separate, machinelike components of a compartmentalized self, although the thought that they are has permeated our present age. It has influenced our politics, our medicine, even our relationships to one another.

Such a mechanistic worldview, exalted in the Age of Enlightenment, was the philosophical outgrowth of Newtonian science. Sir Isaac Newton deemed the world to be like a great machine, which could be understood, and then mastered, through rational thought. At its time, the Newtonian scientific revolution represented a liberating advance in how human beings viewed their world, repudiating superstition and false mystification in favor of the exercise of reason. Several of our Founders—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams among them—aspired to be the Newton of politics and government, and the glories as well as the limitations of our American political system are rooted in their rationalistic sensibilities.

But the world is now awakening from the false premises of a mechanistic worldview, representing one of the most profound revolutions in the history of human thought. In time, that awakening will be brought to bear on every aspect of our lives. For science has now corrected and improved upon Newtonian physics. Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and others established the principles of quantum physics, proving that reality is not quite as solid or objective or deterministic as Newton thought. As British physicist Sir James Jeans proclaimed, the world now turned out to be “not so much a great machine as a great thought.” Some “unreasonable” things are now proved to be true: time flows at different rates for observers moving at different speeds, solid atoms are largely empty, subatomic phenomena are both particles and waves, particles seem to affect each other at a distance even in the absence of a known causal connection, and, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, an object is affected by the act of being observed. Adding to the astounding conclusions of modern physicists, contemporary biologist Rupert Sheldrake has posited the notion of “morphic resonance,” suggesting that there is a unified field of consciousness connecting all life.

Quantum physics gives human consciousness a much more central role in the larger scheme of the universe than did Newtonian science, and this influences our philosophic as well as our scientific outlook. How we perceive and how we interpret things are clearly more than mere symbolic powers, opening the modern mind to a more spiritual interpretation of reality than has been intellectually in vogue for centuries. “The more I study physics,” said Einstein, “the more I am drawn to metaphysics.” Ironically, science has both deprived the soul of its centrality in modern consciousness, and now has given it back.

Our Founders were revolutionary and, for their time, modern thinkers, applying the then cutting-edge science and philosophy of Newton to the politics of their age. Should we not apply, in our time, the principles of modern physics and philosophy to the politics of our own? John Adams ascribed to be this nation’s political Isaac Newton; perhaps someone needs to come along and become our political Rupert Sheldrake

In the words of Thomas Jefferson:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances “institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Today, the rationalism of the European Enlightenment is being repudiated by a more soulful worldview, just as in a previous age, Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy repudiated the overly mystified thinking of the Middle Ages. In every historical era there ensues a creative argument with the past, moving humanity either backwards or forwards depending on who’s in charge. The progress of thought determines the course of human history, and our understanding of both the Newtonian hold on the era now passing, and the quantum possibilities of the age now upon us, provide the tools we need to create a more enlightened future.

TRANSCENDENT DEMOCRATIC FORCES have always been in the American air, with deep and penetrating roots in our history. The Quakers of early Pennsylvania, for example, fostered many of the enlightened attitudes inherent in the U.S. Constitution toward religion, freedom, and the rights of the individual.

Pennsylvania Quakers held profoundly inward-turning spiritual beliefs. They had no ministers, but rather believed in a universal priesthood of all believers. They believed God’s spirit is alive in every human being, this spirit to be accessed not through the written word but through the exercise of conscience. In order to live a life of true religious purity, they claimed, we are to constantly look inward to what they called the “Inner Light.”

This mystical philosophy was the guiding influence on Pennsylvania Quakers during the earliest days of this country; as such, it is as traditionally American as anything can possibly be. Quaker influence continued and spread. During the 1800s, Transcendentalism became a major philosophical movement in the United States. Inspired by the Quaker notion of an internal source of light, its main thrust was the exaltation of the role of intuition in connecting the individual to ultimate truth. American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman created the glory and poetry of the Transcendentalist movement. They formed a counterforce to the materialistic worldview of the approaching industrial era, seeking in whatever way they could to preserve the power of the American soul in the face of an industrial onslaught.

In addition to the role of intuition, and in keeping with the Quaker emphasis on conscience, Thoreau, in his essay called “Civil Disobedience,” put forth the historic proposition that following the dictates of one’s conscience is more important than following the dictates of one’s government. That groundbreaking assertion became the basis for many subsequent political developments, including the prosecution of Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.

In India in 1929, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in a letter to a friend that Thoreau’s essay had “deeply impressed” him.

Inspired in part by the message he garnered there, Gandhi founded the Indian Independence Movement, organizing a massive resistance to the British colonial occupation of India. He developed an entire political philosophy—calling it the philosophy of nonviolence to harness the “soul power” of the Indian people as an instrument of their common good.

Gandhi, himself a Hindu, believed in a universal spiritual Truth reflected in all the great religious teachings of the world. He wasn’t seeking to use spiritual power to achieve a political end; rather, he exalted a state of spirituality from which political healing naturally results. Today’s spiritual renaissance echoes that idea. Political healing flows from spiritual experience because all healing flows from spiritual experience.

According to Gandhi, a nation has a soul just as an individual has one, and living for others is the key to the deliverance of both. An early holistic thinker, Gandhi claimed that if a nation’s soul is healthy, its politics will be healthy as well. He promulgated the notion of sarvodaya, that spiritual power can socialize human relationships and be used as a political force. He claimed that spirit works through matter and makes it harmonious; that it leads to the total blossoming of the individual, physically, mentally, and spiritually; and that the force of spiritual truth is greater than any army, weapons of destruction, or political authority (satyagraha).

Gandhi said politics should be sacred. That is not to say that it should be religionized: it should be infused not with dogma, but with faith in the power of love to heal and sustain all things.

In the words of Gandhi, “Is not politics a part of the dharma too?”

Gandhi wrote:

Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and it knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law, to the strength of the spirit.

Non-violence is a power which can be wielded equally by all children, young men and women or grown-up people, provided they have a living faith in the God of Love and have therefore equal Love for all mankind. When non-violence is accepted as the law of life, it must pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts.

The very first step in non-violence is that we cultivate in our daily life, as between ourselves, truthfulness, humility, tolerance, loving kindness.

Non-violence is an unchangeable creed. It has to be pursued in the face of violence raging around you. The path of true non-violence requires much more courage than violence.

The restoration of India’s independence was secondary to Gandhi; what he wanted was the restoration of India’s soul. Gandhi, and later Martin Luther King, Jr., sought first to address the battered spirits of their people and then to treat the external wounds that the battering produced. They recognized that all political problems were rooted in spiritual wounds.

Just as Gandhi had been influenced by Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., would then be influenced by Gandhi. Finding great inspiration in Gandhi’s teachings, Dr. King traveled to India and then enthusiastically applied the principles of nonviolence to the crusade for civil rights in America. According to both, nonviolence is the love of God alive in every human heart, permeating every aspect of life, whether immaterial or material. There is no wound it cannot heal.

Dr. King said of Gandhi, “He was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale.” Gandhi asserted the notion—and both men displayed it—that “soul force is more powerful than brute force.” He claimed that nonviolence carries more power than any external force; what we lack is belief that this is so. It is mental and spiritual weakness, more than external weakness, which holds us back. Having been trained to focus our eyes outward, most of us are apt to lack faith in the internal powers. Yet, while invisible to the physical eye, nonviolence awaits our decision to use it as a social and political tool. It is the endless and all-powerful love of God, active in the affairs of humanity when it is channeled through us for that purpose.

What Gandhi saw in British colonialism, and Dr. King saw in American institutionalized racism, were superior worldly powers. Yet they knew that because those were powers of might but not right, they would bow in time before the power of love. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Dr. King, “but it bends toward justice.” The nonviolent political movements working for independence in India and civil rights in the United States called for the power of love to triumph over the forces of hate.

A cornerstone of nonviolent philosophy is the notion that violence cannot defeat violence. The opponent is not someone we seek to defeat, but someone whose conscience we seek to arouse. Our conscience is never aroused by someone who hates us, but only by someone who honors us.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story Dr. King wrote the following about nonviolence:

Non-violence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; non-violence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim. . . .

It is not a method of stagnant passivity. The phrase “passive resistance” often gives the false impression that this is a do-nothing method in which the resister quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while the non-violent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually.

It is not passive non-resistance to evil, it is active non-violent resistance to evil.

Our dedication, then, is not just to a political goal but to a new way of life. While the desegregation of the American South was the political goal of the civil rights community, Dr. King said that its ultimate goal was a redeemed world. More than mere political change would be necessary to bring that about. “Our goal is to create a beloved community,” he said, “and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

That, of course, is the hard part. For both Gandhi and King, the “coherence of ends and means” is a first principle of nonviolent philosophy. This means that who we are is as important as what we do, that how we go about change determines what ultimately will be changed, and the process itself is as important as the goal. The end, therefore, does not justify the means because, in fact, the goal is inherent in the means. In the words of Dr. King, “The means must be as pure as the end, for in the long run of history, immoral destructive means cannot bring about moral and constructive ends.

Transforming our own hearts is thus a prerequisite for transforming the world. We will not achieve any higher-minded political goals until we transform the political process, and we cannot transform the political process without transforming ourselves. We need less to get the message out than to get the message in. As Gandhi said, “My life is my message.” We cannot change the world if we are not willing to change ourselves.

IT IS THE transcendent power of God within us that will “doeth the work” of healing the world, but only if we will devote ourselves to the emergence of that power. Gandhi said that the leader of the Indian independence movement was not him, but “the small still voice within.”

According to Dr. King, the steps of nonviolence demand that “self-purification precedes direct political action.” We can’t be instruments of peace if we ourselves are full of emotional violence. The difficulty this poses for spiritual seekers is that to be interested in politics at all today is to be tempted to indulge our rage.

Watching many of the actors on our political stage today, it is obviously very tempting to judge those who disagree with us. Yet it remains our spiritual task to purify ourselves of the temptation to personally demonize. We must resist injustice and criticize how systems operate, without personally attacking individuals within it.

And finding that sweet spot is the work of the enlightened activist. What supports us here is not a personal love but an impersonal one, as we stand up to oppression without demonizing the oppressor. I am reminded of Dr. King’s comment that he was grateful God didn’t say we have to like our enemies! King was inspired by the notion in ancient Greek philosophy of the varieties of love: eros, philia, and agape. Eros is romantic love, which alone won’t save the world. Even philia, or love among friends, lacks the spiritual power to block the world’s decline; it is easy enough to love people who agree with us. Rather, it is agape—our capacity to love even those whom we do not like—that has the power to restore the world to its innocence and grace.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr., said we need “tough minds and tender hearts.” Many tough-minded thinkers in America today seem to lack heart, yet many of the most tender-hearted among us need to toughen up! It’s in the blend of the tough and the tender, the mystical marriage of our minds and our hearts, where we find the key to both our personal and political healing.

The most important thing for us to consider today is how to harmonize our internal and external changes. When I met the Dalai Lama in India in 1996, I asked him, “Your Holiness, if enough of us meditate, will that save the world?” He leaned toward me and said, “I would answer you in reverse. If we want to save the world, we must have a plan. But no plan will work unless we meditate.” I then asked His Holiness another question, to which he responded in a powerful way. I asked him how to apply his philosophy to the state of American politics. “That,” he said pointedly, “is something you need to figure out.”

Indeed, we must.

Chapter 2 will be sent tomorrow!

Preface and Introduction

Dear Friends,

This year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. With our President’s propensity for all things gold, one can only imagine the types of celebrations we’ll be seeing on full display.

Some of us want to foster a different, quieter kind of celebration, however - one in which we’re thinking and feeling deep into the pain as well as the glory of our history in order to reconcile, repair, and help us begin again. I hope you’ll feel TRANSFORM is of use to you in doing that.

This is not a moment to limit the reach of a more meaningful political conversation. So I’ve decided to do our upcoming book club for all subscribers, based on my books HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA as well as THE POLITICS OF LOVE. We will be sending you the contents of both books daily over the next few weeks, starting today.

As I’ve been having some chronic throat issues, I’m afraid we need to postpone the zoom sessions where we’ll discuss the material. I’m thinking June, but we will get back to you about that. For now, I hope you’ll enjoy the books. America’s story is long and complicated. There is a lot to think about and a lot to sort out. I think our patriotic duty is to try.

So glad to be on this journey with you,

Marianne

HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA

PREFACE

Many people are going around today saying, “In any situation, I just ask myself, ‘What would Buddha, or Jesus, do? What would the Torah tell me to do, or the Koran, or the New Testament?’ ” Thinking about such things is a perfect test, reading the news today. Would Jesus, if he were a citizen of the richest nation on earth, choose to feed the poor or fatten the rich? It’s certainly an interesting question.

All of us are better off when contemplation of holy principles is at the center of our lives. But it is in actually applying those principles that we forge the marriage between heaven and earth, whereas merely dwelling on principle falls short of the human effort needed to carry out God’s will. Just as we need the light of the sun yet looking straight into it can blind us, looking straight into the inner light can begin to blind us as well.

There is a point in everyone’s spiritual journey where, if we are not careful, the search for self-awareness can turn into self-preoccupation. There is a fine line at times between self-exploration and narcissism. One way to see how we’re doing is to measure the fun factor: spiritual growth that’s too much fun all the time usually isn’t growth at all. Anything that has become too comfortable cannot ultimately be comforting. The universe is invested in our healing, and healing is a fierce, transformative fire. It is the product of human willingness to change, and change is often hard.

For years, I thought I only had to heal myself, and the world would take care of itself. Clearly we must work on healing our own neuroses in order to become effective healers. But then, having worked on our own issues a while, another question begs for an answer: how healed can we ultimately become while the social systems in which we live and move, and have our earthly being, remain sick?

Years ago, we realized that people’s psychology is intimately bound up with the psychology of their family units. Today, it is very clear that the family, too, dwells within a larger psychological and sociological system. It’s not just our childhoods or families whose dysfunctions influence us; our education system, government, and business structures are often dysfunctional as well, and in a manner that affects us all. None of us lives in isolation anymore, from anyone or anything.

The principles that apply to our personal healing apply as well to the healing of the larger world. First, all healing principles are universal because they come from God. And second, there actually is no objective outer world, for what’s out there is merely a projection of what’s in our minds. The laws of consciousness apply to everything. Anything, when truly seen for what it is and surrendered to the higher mind, begins to self-correct, but what is not looked at is doomed to eternal re-enactment, for an individual or for a nation.

Politics, ideally, is a context for the care of the public good. The word “politics” comes from an ancient Greek root politeia, meaning not “of the government,” but rather “gathering of citizens.” The source of power in America is not the government; the source of power is us. And millions of us, citizens of the United States, have begun to see life in a less mechanistic, more enlightened way. The consciousness revolution has already transformed both mainstream medicine and business: Harvard Medical School has hosted symposiums on the role of spirituality and healing in medicine, and highly paid corporate consultants call on business executives to turn their workplaces into “sanctuaries for the soul.” Politics is the only major corner of America that doesn’t yet seem to have heard that the world has unalterably changed.

There are new ideas on the world’s horizon, as different from the twentieth-century worldview as the twentieth century was different from the nineteenth century. We are ready to apply principles of healing and recovery, not just to our bodies, not just to our relationships, but to every aspect of life.

World conditions challenge us to look beyond the status quo for responses to the pain of our times. We look to powers within as well as to powers without. A new, spiritually based social activism is beginning to assert itself. It stems not from hating what is wrong and trying to fight it, but from loving what could be and making the commitment to bring it forth. A nonviolent political dynamic is once again emerging, and it is a beacon of light at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Its goal, as in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., is “the establishment of the beloved community.” Nothing less will heal our hearts and nothing less will heal the world.

It is a task of our generation to re-create the American politeia, to awaken from our culture of distraction and re-engage the process of democracy with soulfulness and hope. Yes, we see there are problems in the world. But we believe in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right. Such is the divine authority of love: to renew the heart, renew the nations, and ultimately, renew the world.

Amen.

INTRODUCTION

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn’t meddle in the affairs of others
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

—LAO TZU, TAO TE CHING (TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN MITCHELL)”

THIS BOOK IS about the story of American history: the miraculous combination of vision and politics that gave rise to our beginnings, their ultimate rending at various times due to unbridled error, and the current yearning of the American heart to put them back together.

Our Founders embodied the ideals of an extraordinary moment in time, and with the success of the American Revolution they created one of the miracles of modern history. Heirs to the European Age of Enlightenment—a movement proclaiming the inherent goodness of man—our Founders expressed their philosophical vision in the Declaration of Independence and their political genius in the U.S. Constitution. Their balance of philosophical vision and political acumen created a doorway in a seemingly impenetrable wall of history. The Western world was stuck, and they unstuck it.

The founding of the United States was a dramatic repudiation of the ancien régime—a social structure that dominated all of Europe for centuries, placing power in the hands of monarchs and aristocracy, and relegating the masses to serfdom and servitude. A worldview so entrenched as to leave the common masses of humanity little hope of rising above the station in life into which they had been born was abolished forever by a group of young Americans who stood up to what was then the most powerful military force in the world and said, “No. We have a better idea.” They were young and rebellious and—like all revolutionaries—in the eyes of some, quite out of their minds. Their audacity is part of our national heritage. Their hypocrisy, in some cases, is part of our national shame.

Today, many Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders’ courageous repudiation of injustice. Where they claimed their rights to assert power, we have routinely countenanced the diminution of our own. Yet there is among us a collective realization now that this must change. Looking at what other generations did to broaden their freedom helps inspire us to reinvigorate ours.

Our Founders’ primary genius was to rethink political power. They transformed political authority from government to citizen, in keeping with the exaltation of individual goodness so prevalent during the Age of Enlightenment.

The concept of democracy remains a transcendent notion, positing that power flows not from an external but from an internal source. It was not to be the wealth or power of one’s outer circumstances, but the spirit of intelligent goodness which resides inside us all that was entrusted with the authority to rule this nation. While clearly their view of exactly which citizens were to be empowered was severely stunted (the majority of signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners), the ideals they ushered into manifestation remain a light unto the world.

DEMOCRACY, EVEN A representative democracy such as ours, is radical. It was a radical notion in 1776 and it is radical today. Radical, yet fragile. You can’t just set yourself up as a democracy and that’s it from then on. A chain depends on every link. Every generation must relearn and recommit to the foundations of democracy, as they are something that can never, ever be taken for granted. The strength of the democratic concept has not gone away—but neither have the forces of narrow-mindedness, authoritarianism, and fear that would threaten its existence.

After our extraordinary beginnings in a burst of democratic fervor, we turned our attention to other matters. Within a hundred years of our founding, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution raged throughout Europe and the United States. Railroads, electricity, and factory production were the order of the day; scientific experimentation and technological prowess came to embellish our dreams and define our ambitions. As this rush of industrial expansion unfolded, the yang of human assertion and physical manifestation was extraordinary. It’s easy to see how the Western mind became obsessed with America’s material success.

Yet we lost something very precious as the jewels of collective wisdom and understanding were subtly pushed to the side. Intoxicated by technological possibilities, we slowly lost our focus on the light at the center of everything. By the beginning of the twentieth century—despite the valiant efforts of some of our greatest poets and philosophers—attention to our souls had been marginalized by a materialistic focus sweeping across the plains of America’s consciousness like a windstorm that wouldn’t stop.

Money began to replace justice as our highest ambition, and the authoritarian business models of the Industrial Age came to replace democracy as the main organizing principle of American society. The elements of higher truth that so imbued our founding—the stunning declaration that all men are created equal and should share equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—were insidiously exiled to the corners of the American mind. They remained in our documents but began a slow and tortured exit from our hearts.

The very tyrannies from which we had fought to be free would reappear among us, and often we were the oppressors as well as the oppressed. With every generation, we’ve waged a fiery personal and political contest between our most noble and our basest thoughts. Which would control the destiny of our country? Even now, the contest rages.

Over the years, we’ve expanded our physical territory, pushing back against our basest instincts and applying our highest ideals as we abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, banned child labor, ended segregation, legalized gay marriage, and in many other ways remained true to the goal of an expanding liberty for all. Had the Industrial Revolution, with its gargantuan focus on material power, not occurred, then the magnificence of our original ideals might have continued to pull us upward and out of the devolutionary lure of history. But it did occur, and while it allowed the world phenomenal opportunity for the eradication of material suffering, it also clearly fostered our spiritual forgetfulness. Material progress became an American god.

To look in our national mirror is to see both glory and shame. Born of a stunning assertion of the human spirit in the face of tyranny, we then built a nation on the blood of Native Americans and slaves from Africa. We endured the horrors of a Civil War, heroically fought two World Wars, brilliantly helped defeat Hitler—and then imperialistically devastated both Vietnam and Iraq. We are blessed with more money and more technological resources than any other nation in the world, yet we give only 1 percent of our budget away to nations less fortunate than us. We are a nation that loves to say how much we love our children, yet children are less well cared for in America than in any of our industrialized counterparts.

America has always been a land of contradictions. We have been both slave owner and abolitionist, conscienceless industrialist and labor reformer, segregationist and civil rights worker, corporate polluter and world-class environmentalist. Sometimes we have embodied the most brutish attitudes and at other times, in Lincoln’s words, “the angels of our better nature.” But no matter what any of us have chosen to manifest at any particular time, the American ideal as established by our founding documents remains the same: the expression of humanity at its most free and creative and just. That is the point and purpose of this country as represented on the Great Seal of the United States. This mystical seal, designed by Franklin, Adams, and Washington, pictures the capstone returned to the Great Pyramid at Giza, a Masonic symbol for wisdom. The Eye of Horus, representing humanity’s higher mind, dazzlingly proclaims that here we will achieve Novus Ordo Seclorum, a “New Order of the Ages,” the age of the universal brotherhood. That thought, regardless of how corrupted and bastardized it has been at various points in our history, remains our spiritual and political mission. The power of the ideal continues to shine like a beacon for all Americans, exhorting us to become what we originally committed to becoming.

Clearly, our original principles of human justice and freedom—that here, mankind would find sanctuary from the institutionalized tyrannies of the world—have never been fully manifest, but that does not mean that we are bad or even hypocritical. It simply means we are still in the throes of a greater becoming. Our Founders began a process that every generation is challenged to further. A nation is not a thing so much as a process; we’re not a particle, but a wave.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail—these are like ancient tablets on which are inscribed our fundamental yearnings and highest hopes. At the same time, slavery; the Trail of Tears; the Vietnam and Iraq Wars; systemic racism and economic injustice; mass incarceration; official hypocrisy; violence and exalted militarism all form a dark and seemingly impenetrable force field acting like a barrier before our hearts, keeping our hands from being able to grasp those tablets to our chests. It is the task of our generation to break through the wall before us, to atone for our errors, and to reactivate our commitment to the promulgation of our strengths. It is not just that we need our sacred tablets; our sacred tablets, to be living truths, need us.

Greed is considered legitimate now, while too often brotherly love is not.

In America today, 40 percent of our citizens have a difficult time affording the basics of food and rent. More than 45 million people—14.5 percent of all Americans and more than a fifth of America’s children—live beneath the poverty line in the richest nation in the world. That is a number equal to every man, woman, and child in the largest twenty-five cities in America. Millions of children go to school each day in buildings that do not meet minimum safety codes, do not have enough school supplies, or do not even have working toilets. A hundred and thirty-five thousand of them take guns to school each day. Millions more are abandoned, neglected, abused. With less than 5 percent of the world’s people, we have 25 percent of its prison population, where racial disparity in arrest and sentencing is rampant. As is usually the case when a nation has a very high percentage of its citizens behind bars, a tiny portion of our population controls the vast majority of our wealth. Today, we are not so much doing well at manifesting our highest ideals as we are encased in a great philosophical and political struggle over the depth of their violation.

While we politically broke free of serfdom over two hundred years ago, perhaps we have not yet achieved the psychological and spiritual and emotional conditions necessary to sustain our freedoms. The needs of our business institutions are consistently placed before the needs of our people, and the trend is getting worse instead of better. Corporations have become a new aristocracy, while the average American is a new brand of serf. The difference now is that it is possible to buy one’s way into the aristocracy; that, however, is a far cry from removing the institution.

We have exported democracy around the world, yet here at home we are in need of a democratic renewal. From thinly disguised efforts at voter suppression, to industrial agricultural giants practically forcing genetically engineered food into our food supply and trying to outlaw efforts by anyone to let us know, there is a specter of Big Brother in the air that’s growing uglier every day. What happened to Americans, that we have become so easy to seduce with a tax cut here or distract with a sex scandal there? What happened that we are willing to place the good of corporations before the good of our children, that we have been willing to countenance the corruption of our political system by the dominance of corporate wealth? What happened to the “spirit of rebellion” without which, according to Thomas Jefferson, democracy cannot survive? We, the citizens of the freest, most powerful nation on earth, gave up our power as too often we gave up our principles. As short-term economic gain became so solidly our bottom line, we failed to question the moral damage this was doing to America’s soul. The corruption did not stop there, however. Now it aims for our democracy.

Though the hour is late, the American legacy of independent thought is rising once again. Independent thought is a rebellious act, not always appreciated. Throughout human history—from Jesus to Galileo to the Founders of the United States to Martin Luther King, Jr.—the status quo has never embraced the harbinger of its demise. While our nation was literally created out of the rebellion against an entrenched and tyrannous status quo, for too many of the last fifty years the average American was more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedoms. Now we are having to catch up.

It is always inspiring to bear witness to great spirits who preceded us, who lived as we do in both exciting and difficult times, and whose lives bore witness to the hunger for some transcendent good. There have been those in history who personified perfectly, or nearly so, the balance of soul and political intelligence necessary to right the wrongs of history. From our Founders, to Lincoln, to Mahatma Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., there are those that humanity can point to and say, “There, they got it right.” They, like us, did not have perfect childhoods or face simple problems. They, too, had obstacles to their full becoming. Their significance is all the greater because they transcended them.

Our Founders had a job to do: to win freedom from the English and forge for the United States our own political identity. Lincoln had a job to do: to preserve the Union and make it a nation worth fighting for. Gandhi had a job to do: to lead a nonviolent crusade for India’s independence. Dr. King had a job to do: to lead the struggle for American civil rights. These people didn’t whine; they acted. They didn’t give in to despair; they created revolutions. They didn’t curse the darkness; they became the light—passionately intelligent people in service to the job at hand. They put aside their childish inclinations and served a process larger than themselves. They were not without pain, nor were they perfect people—any more than we are perfect—when they heard and responded to the call of history. They answered the plea for democracy and justice made throughout the ages, and having answered it, were given all the strength they needed to bring forth the resurrection of good. These were not geniuses who just happened to care about the human race; they were people who cared passionately about the human race, and out of that passion their genius emerged.

Love is its own brand of genius. Our only true enemy is neither people nor institutions, but fear-laden thoughts that cling to our insides and sap us of our strength. Yet love casts out fear, the way light casts out darkness. Our greatest political power, now, is to fear nothing and love everything; then all things will heal. Love is the only power strong enough to lift the chains of bondage from the human race and cast them off for good.

When the material world has been won by the opponent, go otherworldly to find your victory.

The words of Abraham Lincoln, in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, echo to us now: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We . . . will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation. . . . We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth.”

Americans have the intelligence; it’s time to retrieve our souls. We have a political democracy still; it’s time to reclaim our commitment to keeping it, and live up to the historical challenge to make it even better for our children and theirs. We will be given, as every generation before us has been given, all the divine aid necessary to further the principles on which we were founded. Democracy is profoundly relevant to the evolution of humanity, and as such it carries the psychological momentum to create miracles in the strangest places.

“To some generations,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in 1936, “much is given. From some generations, much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”

So does ours. And we are accompanied on that rendezvous by invisible companions who were there for our forefathers and will be there for our children. Today, if we open our eyes to see, we will see that they are here for us…

Tomorrow we’ll send Chapter 1!