They’ve been running a series on the Vietnam War and the attendant political movements in the US on PBS lately, and my wife tunes into it regularly. I, on the other hand, pass it by quickly on my way upstairs to read. This is what I normally do when the tube is on, academic snob that I am (except for a good football game) but with the Vietnam War special, I walk – no run – especially fast. It does not matter what element is on display at the time – the Tet Offensive, or slices of Woodstock – I still can’t stand it. Last night, I saw the cops in Chicago clubbing protesters at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 with astonishing zeal, something that we would never see today, and on I ran. No, I do not need to relive that.
Which is funny, since I wrote an entire book, Dream Weaver, based on the immediate aftermath of that war. As a matter of fact, it is with the war that the book began – what caused the US culture of victory, hatched from WW 1 and 11, to slide into one of self-doubt and, in many ways, self-annihilation - and it is because of this latter point that perhaps the era might now sicken me. Perhaps writing the book was a sort of catharsis, a self-cleansing that I was throwing out to the world, which I know it was. But the book was also something more- a look ahead to a possible new age, one with serious distractions and doubts to be sure, but with a new something that might someday get a head of steam and deliver us to another, and better, trajectory.
The war era itself, though, brought much of something else. As I look at the grainy photos, of the burning rice paddies in Vietnam and the side-burned youthful rebels in Chicago and elsewhere, I do not see hope, but rather the mess and hatred and loathing of a particular era. In that time I was too young, missing mandatory military enlistment by a year, but the impact, the feeling of the time weighed heavily. I thought then that I was having fun, being a rebel and getting high, but I can see now by my reaction to the documentary that it was much more about trauma than fun, much more about denial than facing what was really happening. America was falling apart. Not just from the military involvements, not just from the recent civil rights protests, but from everything and everywhere. Everything was not only being brought into question, but being ridiculed and tramped upon, just like so many American flags at the protest rallies. For a teenager who had first been raised in the old America of traditional values and patriotism, it was, in the end, truly traumatic.
I know that now. It is true that when civilizations crumble, it usually starts from within, but it is the barbarians from without who finish the job. In America, that was not the case; within was strong, but it had serious divisions formed from its own guiding principles of free speech and free thought – and the desire for perfect justice. But there is no perfect justice in this world, and everything is, at one level or another, superficial in the face of this perfection. In light of the seemingly-endless Asian war, the self-criticism hit home, and we would never be happily chauvinistic again – as all other successful civilizations have been.
Collapse. Freefall. We have joined the rest of the West, which decided it hated itself some time ago due to corrupt colonialism and two hideous wars.
Again, I am drawn to the big question: annihilation or New Age? And again, I am forced to look to the spiritual, for if there are not spiritual guiding principles, as so many now believe, there really is no hope. If there is no spiritual guidance, then there is NO justice, NO truth, NO evolution of consciousness. All, then, is man-made, morality and principles only products of the interests of those who hold the greatest power. The Romans understood this. They had principles, all right, but might was the greatest principle, victory being the one and only true signifier of truth. We forget that now. We think that the perfection of the principles that Christian Europe forged is humanity’s ultimate goal because our sense of justice seems naturally right to us, but it does not seem right to the North Koreans or to the Taliban or to the mainland Chinese. In fact, all human societies are wrong if you believe in the now-standard evolutionary model of randomness. If this is true, then you must believe that, in the end, we are literally going nowhere. Without the spiritual, there is no truth and there is no positive evolution of consciousness.
Which is why depression and suicide are ever increasing. Many young people, too cynical and too smart to believe in the current political and scientific dogmas, see nothing but gray ahead, at best, and complete destruction, at worst. The spiritual to them is a chimera as well, for if our cultural values are so false that they are falling apart, then how can invisible spiritual powers avoid the same fate?
And yet, with a slight change in perspective, it is obvious that this is a spiritual universe. I can name all the easy things – how did we come from nothing, why do we evolve into more complex organisms, how does self-consciousness arise from gross matter? – but there are always clever answers to anything. Really, though, spiritual reality is about human experience. Theologian Mathew Fox said that mysticism is about trusting our experience, and that is a wise and great observation. All of reality is based on a shared trust, that what most see is real, and this includes the spiritual. Nearly all, if not all, have had spiritual experiences. It is only in denying them as “real” that they are given no importance. Give them importance. Our religious traditions help us parse the imaginary and insane from the spiritual, but after that, it is up to us to believe in what we experience. In this is everything – our culture, our hope, our future, everything that makes life worth living. In the gifts of the spirit – in the perception of beauty, in the patterns of nature, in the love of family and more, we are told that we are part of something greater. We have all experienced this. We only have to be subjective scientists, true to the call for proof, to understand that the sense of greatness in existence that all or most experience, is experienced because it is real. So, be a mystic; believe in your experience and just maybe save the world. FK
Which is funny, since I wrote an entire book, Dream Weaver, based on the immediate aftermath of that war. As a matter of fact, it is with the war that the book began – what caused the US culture of victory, hatched from WW 1 and 11, to slide into one of self-doubt and, in many ways, self-annihilation - and it is because of this latter point that perhaps the era might now sicken me. Perhaps writing the book was a sort of catharsis, a self-cleansing that I was throwing out to the world, which I know it was. But the book was also something more- a look ahead to a possible new age, one with serious distractions and doubts to be sure, but with a new something that might someday get a head of steam and deliver us to another, and better, trajectory.
The war era itself, though, brought much of something else. As I look at the grainy photos, of the burning rice paddies in Vietnam and the side-burned youthful rebels in Chicago and elsewhere, I do not see hope, but rather the mess and hatred and loathing of a particular era. In that time I was too young, missing mandatory military enlistment by a year, but the impact, the feeling of the time weighed heavily. I thought then that I was having fun, being a rebel and getting high, but I can see now by my reaction to the documentary that it was much more about trauma than fun, much more about denial than facing what was really happening. America was falling apart. Not just from the military involvements, not just from the recent civil rights protests, but from everything and everywhere. Everything was not only being brought into question, but being ridiculed and tramped upon, just like so many American flags at the protest rallies. For a teenager who had first been raised in the old America of traditional values and patriotism, it was, in the end, truly traumatic.
I know that now. It is true that when civilizations crumble, it usually starts from within, but it is the barbarians from without who finish the job. In America, that was not the case; within was strong, but it had serious divisions formed from its own guiding principles of free speech and free thought – and the desire for perfect justice. But there is no perfect justice in this world, and everything is, at one level or another, superficial in the face of this perfection. In light of the seemingly-endless Asian war, the self-criticism hit home, and we would never be happily chauvinistic again – as all other successful civilizations have been.
Collapse. Freefall. We have joined the rest of the West, which decided it hated itself some time ago due to corrupt colonialism and two hideous wars.
Again, I am drawn to the big question: annihilation or New Age? And again, I am forced to look to the spiritual, for if there are not spiritual guiding principles, as so many now believe, there really is no hope. If there is no spiritual guidance, then there is NO justice, NO truth, NO evolution of consciousness. All, then, is man-made, morality and principles only products of the interests of those who hold the greatest power. The Romans understood this. They had principles, all right, but might was the greatest principle, victory being the one and only true signifier of truth. We forget that now. We think that the perfection of the principles that Christian Europe forged is humanity’s ultimate goal because our sense of justice seems naturally right to us, but it does not seem right to the North Koreans or to the Taliban or to the mainland Chinese. In fact, all human societies are wrong if you believe in the now-standard evolutionary model of randomness. If this is true, then you must believe that, in the end, we are literally going nowhere. Without the spiritual, there is no truth and there is no positive evolution of consciousness.
Which is why depression and suicide are ever increasing. Many young people, too cynical and too smart to believe in the current political and scientific dogmas, see nothing but gray ahead, at best, and complete destruction, at worst. The spiritual to them is a chimera as well, for if our cultural values are so false that they are falling apart, then how can invisible spiritual powers avoid the same fate?
And yet, with a slight change in perspective, it is obvious that this is a spiritual universe. I can name all the easy things – how did we come from nothing, why do we evolve into more complex organisms, how does self-consciousness arise from gross matter? – but there are always clever answers to anything. Really, though, spiritual reality is about human experience. Theologian Mathew Fox said that mysticism is about trusting our experience, and that is a wise and great observation. All of reality is based on a shared trust, that what most see is real, and this includes the spiritual. Nearly all, if not all, have had spiritual experiences. It is only in denying them as “real” that they are given no importance. Give them importance. Our religious traditions help us parse the imaginary and insane from the spiritual, but after that, it is up to us to believe in what we experience. In this is everything – our culture, our hope, our future, everything that makes life worth living. In the gifts of the spirit – in the perception of beauty, in the patterns of nature, in the love of family and more, we are told that we are part of something greater. We have all experienced this. We only have to be subjective scientists, true to the call for proof, to understand that the sense of greatness in existence that all or most experience, is experienced because it is real. So, be a mystic; believe in your experience and just maybe save the world. FK
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