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!
Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles
Is the discussion happening today 2PM PT May 12? There isn't anyone at the link.