© May 29, 2006
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
I’m living the American Dream!
Taylor Hicks, Winner of the “American Idol” singing contest during the television’s May 2006 sweeps. More than 50 millions Americans voted in the finals of this contest.
NOTE: This is taken from the PROLOGUE of my new book “NOWHERE MAN” in “NOWHERE LAND.” The manuscript is with my agent looking for a publisher.
Society appears to be coming apart at its cultural seams. Shattering dissembling fear is on the rampage. People are acting in strange ways. The psychological plates of faith and rationality are shifting tectonically with little notice. Noticed are natural disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, mudslide, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes, reminding man something is amiss. Weather has become the most important news of the day.
Yet man insists he is in charge. Nature is his domain to control. He imposes regularity, consistency, continuity, and conformity in defiance of Mother Nature’s intrinsic rhythm in his quest to subdue her to his bidding. Nature erupts with a vengeance in defiance of this conceit in one natural disaster after another.
So, does he wake up one morning, finally seeing the light, saying, “The world is not as I see it; the world I have constructed is in chaos, my existence in ruins; I must act differently?”
No, he moves out of the real and quietly into the dreamlike. He does this in a way that makes him think nothing has changed. He becomes inauthentic to himself and his world. He moves into “Nowhere Land” as “Nowhere Man.”
The indicators are always there, sometimes subtle such as erosion over time of an entire coastline or shockingly tragic such as Hurricane Katrina. Katrina set off alarm bells, which instead of waking man from his utopian dream seem to drive him further into it. But it is not only natural disasters that can drive man further from himself. Sometimes it is the diversion of an entertaining novel such as "The Da Vinci Code" (2003) written by Dan Brown, which has provided welcome escape from the real to contemplate the myths surrounding Jesus. It is easy to debate what has no definitive answer.
Still, even so, timing is everything. Take novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930). He was dying and wrote a controversial novel of Jesus titled "The Man Who Died" (1928). Lawrence believed his Christian culture had impoverished and deranged Western man. The Man Who Died was his attempt to draw attention to this fact in this provocative work of fiction. With profound spiritual insight, deep reverence, and sense of blood kinship and sympathy for the crucified Jesus, Lawrence humanizes him beyond the Cross. He chose to see his final fulfillment in perfected and untroubled physical love with a woman named Madeleine. Lawrence writes:
"Risen from the dead, he had realized at last that the body, too, has its little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was a virgin, in recoil from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity is a form of greed. Now he knew that he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take, and with whom he could mingle his body."
This book created not a ripple. Why was that? Lawrence was a giant literary figure of his time, a voice of liberation for his boldness, while Brown is an adventure novelist and hardly an intellectual. Lawrence failed to provoke because it was not the right time or circumstances. Society, might it be said, was not quite mad enough? The madness enveloping society then was just breaking free of rigorous Puritanical convention with Sigmund Freud in the mix. Had Lawrence said that Jesus had died and married and had progeny it would hardly have been reported. Critics might have said, “Well, that’s Lawrence,isn't it?” and left it at that with readers doing the same.
The timing was off for religious hysteria. The timing is right for it now. The world has grown much smaller with three billion more souls and with more technology to drive these souls further from each other and from themselves . . . into “Nowhere Land.” There is less prudence, less sensual control, less reverence of persons. The American Catholic Church, alone, has paid billions in retribution to scarred individuals abused, sometimes decades ago, by the religious, mainly priests.
It has become a time not only of uncertainty, but a time when relationships are less naturally reinforcing. They are now more contrived and devious. It has become a time when becoming somebody is more important than being someone. It has become a time when life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are only words on a scroll and often mean the exact opposite in practice. It has become Orwell’s “1984,” only in the twenty-first century. It has become a time when rights are confused with privileges and lives are wasted in extravagant behavior.
So, what should we do? A big first step would be to accept that it has happened; that its source is not “out there,” but in the duplicitous heart of man. Resolution is not to be found in robotics, MP3’s, cell phones, iPods or other digital miracles of the times, but in the naked acceptance that man is increasingly anxious and has lost his moral compass.
What of morality? That is a good question. Morality that is constructed for man with the Koran, the Bible, Talmud, I-Ching, the Tao, or Confucian ethics has proven the road less taken, corrupting these sacred texts with contrary objectives to their respective tenets. Morality is in the mind of the times. The morality of these times is essentially amoral if not immoral. You don’t bomb abortion clinics, suicide bomb innocent civilians, or preemptively invade sovereign states if conventional morality is intact. The problem is much simpler, however, than a case of morality versus amorality.
Morality is not on trial. Civility is, that is, arbitrary standards of behavior are on trial. Lifestyle is killing our planet. We live a bizarre superficial existence and will do anything to escape responsibility for our plight. Fifty million residence of the United States voted for their choice on television’s “American Idol,” a fact that got front-page coverage in local and national print and television outlets in May 2006, while only 100 million citizens voted in the national election for president of the United States in 2004. Fame is apparently more important than purpose, fluff more commanding than substance. We live in the prison of our minds, which appears a surreal playground of frivolous images. D. H. Lawrence in Apocalypse (1931):
"Man thought and still thinks in images. But now our images have hardly any emotional value. We always want a “conclusion,” and end, we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full stop. This gives us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in stages, like our sentences, and every full stop is a milestone that marks our “progress” and our arrival somewhere. On and on we go, for the mental consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to."
This mania for getting somewhere, being someone, soaring above the crowd has only driven us deeper into “Nowhere Land.” This is apparent with graphic clarity, not as a question of morality, but as an expression of improvident waste. Society’s “Wonder of the World” is a garbage dump, and we are all heedless contributors to its construction. If sin there is, and I see no profit in that speculation, then waste is the only sin: waste of talent, waste of time, waste of social chemistry, waste of energy, waste of spirit, and waste of reason.
Taboo has been lifted from our behavioral grammar. There is no ideal, no consensus benchmark, everything is fluid. To force an ideal on man at this time is not to gain his attention much less energy to grapple with the problem. It would only make him more defensive, chasing him deeper into “Nowhere Land.” A better strategy might be to describe the problem by telling a story, letting the reader decide whether he is on this road most taken, or living compatibly with Nature, on the road less taken.
Man is blessed with a mind, a conscience, and a memory with the ability to displace conscience and erase memory allowing him to act as if he is above everything that imprisons him, a god almighty that needs no other. We know this is so because we are a society of strangers who are as much self-estranged as xenophobic. We have lost our connection with the cosmos. Again Lawrence observes in Apocalypse:
"We have lost the sun. And he only falls on us and destroys us, decomposing something in us: the dragon of destruction instead of the life-bringer. And we have lost the moon, the cool, bright, ever-varying moon. It is she who would caress our nerves, smooth them with the silky hand of her glowing, soothe them into serenity again with her cool presence. For the moon is the mistress . . . The sun, the moon, the planets, instead of being the communers, the comminglers, the life-givers, the splendid ones, the awful ones, had already fallen into a sort of deadness; they were the arbitrary, almost mechanical engineers of fate and destiny. The Christians escaped this prison by denying the body altogether. But alas, these little escapes! especially the escapes by denial! – they are the most fatal of evasions. Christianity and our ideal civilization have been one long evasion. It has caused endless lying and misery, misery such as people know today, not of physical want but of far more deadly vital want. Better lack bread than lack life. The long evasion, whose only fruit is the machine! We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is as sackcloth."
The God of Christianity, as Nietzsche has said, is dead, replaced by secularism where the cosmos is something to study with no since of divine connection to it. Secular society that has replaced God in the god of science is on trial. There is little sense that we are healthy, happy, hopeful, or humble. Instead, there is more evidence we are arrogant, solipsistic and vain, displaying a confidence that we do not feel but can only construct as an illusion to itself.
It is so easy, and this is not new but is common to man for millennia, and that is to do what is expedient and satisfying in the now, and to give little mind to consequences in the future. We have split the atom and now find we have split our conscience from ourselves. Rather than rethinking the use of nuclear power, or indeed nuclear weapons, scientists at the WASTE ISOLATION PILOT PLANT, one of the United States’ repositories for long-lasting waste from nuclear weapon production, are preparing a warning system designed to be legible and understandable for 500 future generations, marked “Stay Out” forever. Future shock, according one panelist, is real: “Civilization is so interdependent that any massive global catastrophe might lead to reversion to at least a pre-industrial era.” Does such a warning resonate with man today? Not if he is in “Nowhere Land.”
If man were to stand his ground as Jesus is alluded to have, advocating to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s, and mean it not only in words but show it in deeds, we would be a different society and these would be different times. The same might be said of followers of Moses, Mohamed, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, and all the other men who stepped outside “Nowhere Land” with their eyes on the road less traveled.
We have been trapped in our minds, as Krishnamurti has put it, intoxicated with ideas to show us the way out of “Nowhere Land.” His followers wanted to make him their Messiah, which he refused, reminding them, “he who is lost cannot be found by another.” He saw the mind the source of this handicapping problem, a mind that is never quiet but always engaged, a mind that enslaves and imprisons itself in an eternal "now" serenaded by constant noise.
Krishnamurti believed the quiet mind is the only path to peace, fulfillment and freedom. This is a mind that is at home in the body and in rhythm with the universe. It is not a prideful mind, not an acquisitive mind, not a self-conscious mind, nor an aggressive mind, but a mind that is one with itself and Nature. Indeed, the self no longer exists in such a mind. It is a mind that weeps and wonders and moves like the metronome to the syncope of the river with no beginning or end, and which survives the torrents of the time to find its home not in “Nowhere Land,” nor as “Nowhere Man,” but as man, the animal, a creature who has much in common with other creatures, and in which these animals have as much right to exist as does he.
God is not an anthropomorphic being riding the clouds with His outstretched hands but is more likely in a mythic sense a Universal Mind enclosed in the universe and connected like a laser being to the human heart. The secret of being is that this connection gives us the opportunity of being as opposed to becoming, of creating as opposed to destroying. It provides the freedom to connect with others or to detach us from them. This Universal Presence is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is in our human hearts that some call “God,” and religions construct road rules, that has become the road less traveled.
The road more traveled is the one marked off with the “seven deadly sins,” the road of disease, pain, war, and pestilence with a God above with folded arms looking down in righteous judgment. It is the God that atheists and agnostics reject. They see the “god within” and the Universal Mind have a rhythm that has nothing to do with this road more traveled, but everything to do with the rhythm of the human heart in sync with the cosmos. If man moves to the rhythm of this cosmic beat, then everything in the micro and macro sense must be in syncope with it. Joseph Campbell captures the Indian sense of this in The Mythic Image (1974):
"One Brahma year is reckoned as 360 Brahma days and nights, each night and each day consisting of 12,000,000 divine years. But each divine year, in turn, consists of 360 human years; so that one full day and night of Brahma, or 24,000,000 times 360 or 8,640,000,000 human years, just as in our own system of reckoning the 24 hours of a day contain 86,400 seconds – each second corresponding to the length of time, furthermore, of one heartbeat of a human body in perfect physical condition. Thus it appears not only that the temporal order written on the faces of our clocks is the same as that of the Indian god Vishnu’s dream, but also that there is built into this system the mythological concept of a correspondence between the organic rhythms of the human body as a microcosm and the cycling eons of the universe, the macrocosm."
Mystics of other cultures might remind us that human beings are kin to the moose and elk, the buffalo and bear, swamp rat and beaver, carp and eagle, and all other organic and inorganic manifestations of Nature from the tree to soy grass, from parched earth to fertile plains, from ranging mountains to cascading glaciers, from polar bears to seals, from penguins to porpoises, from sublime transcending splendor to incredibly shocking conflagration; from time to timeliness, from day to night, from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, from white man to black man, from yellow man to brown man, from red man to all combinations thereof; from the East to West, North to South, from the small village to the refugee camp in Africa, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the banks of the Amazon, from ox and plow farming to electronic robotic agribusiness. They would say, “This is his entire home. There is no where else for him to go.”
“Nowhere Man” would deny this and take comfort in wealth accumulation where he imagines he cannot be touched, cannot be hurt, that he is above the fray, outside its limitations and demands, only to find himself a resident of “Nowhere Land.” Members of this community subscribe to the same deceit that they are different taking satisfaction in that illusion when we are all the same. We all are born, live for a little while, and die, fertilizing the earth with our nitrogen. Then as Hindu or Buddha mystics might suggest we satisfy our Karma being born again as a deer or a tree or a horse or a child in a home of a mother without affection, or a home that is like stepping into royalty with a golden spoon in the child’s mouth. But it is all the same the mystics would tell us, all part of the same recycling, a perpetual transmigration of ethical consequences to satisfy the debt of our souls.
Much as we would like to think otherwise, we are more alike than different, meeting ourselves every day in the person of another. Were we to accept our connection to everyone and everything on this small planet chances are we would act more like owners than renters.
So, with this litany as background, I move on to my story in this little book. What do I hope to gain in the writing? Nothing. Then what do I hope to realize? Again, the answer is nothing. So, why write the book? Like a burr in the saddle, a sliver in the toe, a pain in the neck, an ache in the stomach, a flutter in the heart, I am aware my days are numbered as they are for us all, and the urge to share this perspective has become frankly overwhelming. What I say may have little moment with you, the reader, but I say it nonetheless, knowing in any case words don’t move the world, only deeds that translate into action do.
Lifestyle is killing our planet and us with it. Likewise, a change in lifestyle will redeem us, not modern medicine. It is lifestyle that is corrupting us and causing these tectonic shifts in the fissures of our minds, giving birth to disruptive overindulgent. An associated Press poll (2006) found the United States is an “impatient nation,” growing antsy after five minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes max in a line. People complain about Department of Motor Vehicle lines, post office lines, waiting in check out lines in supermarkets and discount stores. Veteran residence of communities threaten “to move on” to somewhere else.
Early in the last century the United States was 100 million; early in the twenty-first century it is nearly 300 million. Before the beginning of the next century it will be 500 million. Where will people go? The answer is already apparent despite the frantic hat tricks of technologists and merchandisers. The impatient nation is taken up residence in “Nowhere Land” with identity cards with their pictures on them for “Nowhere Man.”
So, I invite you to consider my little thesis, which you may reject out of hand, or gain new insight into the “you” that you are that rides the rails of life every day. Am I right? Am I wrong? It is not for me to make that determination, but for you, the reader. To that end, I wish you well.
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