Posted by dj on July 5, 2000, at 16:32:31
Intro. to "Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens"
"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)According to ancient Chinese philosophy, the forces of yin and yang create the balance of the universe. They manifest as night and day, darkness and light, feminine and masculine, inner and outer, heart and head. They balance, border, and complete each other, forming together a unified whole.
Understanding this dynamic affords us a deeper awareness of the rhythms underlying all things. Yin and yang emanate from a primordial Oneness that the Chinese call the Tao, a mystical underpinning to all worldly events. This Oneness, which is the field from whence all possibilities flow, constantly choreographs a dancing universe. The dual forces of the phenomenal world make passionate moves at every turn. Where there is yin, yang finds it; where there is yang, yin awaits. This dance creates the drama of human existence, the metaphysical engine that makes the world go round.
This book is about the yin and yang of American history: the miraculous combination of vision and politics that gave rise to our beginnings, their ultimate rending at the hands of unbridled human passion, 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 acumen, and mature serenity with revolutionary fervor 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 regime- 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.
Today, most 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 routinely countenance the diminution of our own. Looking at what they 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 a governmental source to a citizen source, in keeping with the exaltation of individual goodness so prevalent during the Age of the Enlightenment. American democracy is a transcendent motion, positing that power flows not from without but from within. 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.
This was a radical thought then and it is a radical thought now. It is radical, yet it is fragile. You can't just set yourself up as a democracy, and that's it. 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, dominance, 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 American's material success.
Yet we lost something very precious as the yin of greater wisdom and understanding was 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 this time we were the oppressors as well as the oppressed. With every generation--including our own--we've waged a fiery personal and political contest between our most noble and our basest thoughts. Which would control the destiny of this nation?
We expanded our physical territory and our commitment to freedom, applying our highest ideals as we abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, banned child labor, and in many other ways remained true to the goal of an expanding democracy. 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 become 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 Vietnam. We are blessed with more money and more technological resources than any other nation of the world, yet we give only six-tenths of 1 percent of our budget away to nations less fortunate than we. 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, 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 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 means only that we are a nation 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 a 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 War, systemic racism and economic injustice, official hypocrisy, violence, and exalted militarism 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 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.
There is so much injustice in America today, yet such conspiracy not to discuss it; there is so much suffering, yet so much deflection lest we notice. Greed is considered legitimate now, while brotherly love is not.
Thirty-six million people--including a fifth of America's children--live in poverty in the richest nation of 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. One hundred thousand of them take guns to school each day. Millions more are abandoned, neglected, abused. We now imprison more people--six times more than either Russia or China--than any other nation on earth, and the vast majority of our prisoners are people of color. As is usually the case when a nation has a very high percentage of its citizens behind bars, a small 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 neurotic cultural denial regarding the depth of their violation.
Do we not know these things, or are we merely desensitized to the facts? What happened to us that we have become so complacent? Why are we not demanding that these situations be ameliorated? 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, while at home we could clearly use a democratic renewal. From the FDIC's trying to pass "Know your Customer" laws requiring banks to report to the government every citizen's private financial transactions, 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 scepter of big brother in the air, 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, have become so solidly our bottom line that scarcely anyone dares question the moral damage this is doing to the American soul.
Independent thought is a rebellious act, not always appreciated by one's environment. 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 harbingers of its demise. Our nation, as we have seen, was literally created out of the rebellion against an entrenched and tyrannous status quo. Today's average American, however, is more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedoms.
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 did.
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 or 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 powerful enough to lift the chains of bondage off 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, echo to us now: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. WeŠwill be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trail through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generationŠ. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth."
Americans have the yang; it's time to reclaim the yin. We 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."
Copyright ©1997 by Marianne Williamson --From Healing the Soul of America : Reclaiming Our Voices As Spiritual Citizens, by Marianne Williamson. © February 2000 , Marianne Williamson used by permission.
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