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!