At-risk teens shine on stage - Entertainment - The Orange County Register

At-risk teens shine on stage - Entertainment - The Orange County Register

Here's an article on the use of the arts for at-risk teens.

On the Trail of Dante: Towards a Vision of Paradise

“The highway of Love ends at the foot of the Cross” -- D.H. Lawrence

The acquired knowledge of the soul, as described in the previous blog, would induce a rapid succession of revelations, causing a foundational shift in my worldview and how we can truly progress as a society, and enable a projection of a kind of heaven on earth. The muse of ecstatic imagination and creative inspiration, that before had seemed to tease me along as a writer, suddenly seized upon me and poured right through me as my attention turned to transforming this vision into action.

Furthemore, my casual musings on love would synthesize into a spiritual awakening and "road to damascus" kind of experience of ecstatic illumination: take love far enough, it is self-sacrifice for the greater collective, hence the symbolism of Christ accepting the cross and the representation that God is love. As the Romans crucified Jesus of Nazareth at calvary to set an example, symbolizing their power and instilling fear, the fact that that same symbol would come to represent the power of love – eventually overtaking the Romans before their empire dissolved into history – that remains an effective force to this day, strikes me as a miracle and enough to make me a believer.

After years of a floundering existence marked by failure and rejection, at that time in 2002, I thought I'd finally arrived, and perhaps I did. But my life would resume an existence blessed in many respects while accursed in others. From the heights of basking in divine love, I fell back into the ways of the fallen world, retaining a degree of oscillation between the regions of both heaven and hell. On some level I've tried to accept this as my fate, as expressed in my poem, “The Poet that Rides the Waves” (see blog entry on June 27) while my spiritual journey continues.

On the Trail of Dante: Ascending beyond Purgatory

The picture of myself posted on the blog, by the way, is taken from “Dante’s View” in Death Valley National Park overlooking the valley, one of the hottest and lowest places on earth.

From a spiritual low point and crisis in 1997, by 2002, following Whitman and love in general, I’d ascended to a kind of purgatory. But like Virgil in Dante’s epic, Whitman could only take me so far. Dante would have his Beatrice, and so it would seem, I would have mine.

Based on my experience, a person may bare their heart upon occasion, but to bare one's soul is something quite different and a rarer occurence. My wife bared her soul to me on two separate occasions: the first time, in our hellish days, I couldn’t appreciate it at the time; yet both occurrences would shake me to the core. The second time, however, because of my ruminations on Whitman and the experience of my own personal odyssey, it would seem to set off a chain reaction within me and induce a rapid succession of revelations.

Through a physical act of sexual love and healing came immediate clarification as to what had put her in the depths of hell, through no fault of her own, the ramifications of a past of repeated childhood sexual abuse. But beyond the personal, I came to appreciate how a shameful truth, that the mind can fail to recognize, impairs our reason and alters our world view. Furthermore, I came to appreciate inextricability of love and the truth. Coming forward with the awful truth and finding love is how we can save each other on earth.

On the Trail of Dante: Surviving and Ascending in Hell

In the previous blog I described how I found myself in hell. As a means to help survive hell on earth is Henry Miller's book, Tropic of Cancer. While I don't expect many pastors to recommend the book to their congregation, to me it's a kind of Book of Job for the modern era. For the suicidal, launching into the "to be or not to be", it's tough to kill yourself with the image of Henry Miller across the room laughing at you. Furthermore, it was through Tropic of Cancer that I came to the poetry of Walt Whitman, who in time would prove to be my Virgil. In Dante's epic, the poet Virgil represents human reason, and what I appreciate about Walt Whitman is that he never asks me to abandon reason (unlike some pastors). Finding my way out of hell would be through love but such a route is not always clear. After a personal crisis where I stood at the edge of the abyss and looked down, I began to follow Whitman. Through Whitman did I come to appreciate that love and happiness are not one and the same. Abandoning the pursuit of happiness, which proved to be ever elusive, I instead initiated the pursuit of love. In the pursuit of love, to love for love's sake, so I began ascending from the depths.

On the Trail of Dante: My Journey into Hell

Having been raised secular, my spiritual journey began in poetry and can be described with some allusion to Dante's Divine Comedy. It begins in the dark wood of despair, as prospects for both myself and our consumer society began to dim. Proud in my existential reason and libertine notions of sexuality, I at least had the prospects of curvy women to stir my senses and propel me forward toward some promise and alleviation in life. So I set out in the pursuit of happiness, driven by passion and novelty.

Coming of age after the sexual revolution, I applied my moral reasoning: it's natural, it's consensual, it's expected without necessarily any commitment. But on some level deeper than reason, I cared for these women and they care for me. After the inevitable disenchantment and break up, there were tears, sorrow, and shame. What's more, the promise and the realization began to increasingly diverge.

Being a restless spirit in my youth, my life would lapse into an odyssey of wandering that carried me across the country, never achieving a sustainable level of satisfaction, and never staying in any one place, job, or relationship for very long. This accumulation of shame -- something that the mind doesn't completely pick up on -- carried me in a downward spiral to the depths and the realm of shame and despair, the manifestation of hell on earth.

New York Times Editorial on Corporations and the State

Like many progressives, I have a level of distrust towards corporations and their political influence in our democratic society, especially concerning the environment. But here's an editorial by New York Times Columnist David Brooks that gives me pause to look at the issue in another way. Brooks, I believe, raises some important issues.

Coming Down off the Precipice: My Essential Message

“The condition of men is the result of their disunion.” – Tolstoy (from The Kingdom of God is Within You).

As we come down off the precipice where I'd strived to provide you with a view of the Promised Land and how we can get there, I realize it's a lot to take in. But to intone the concluding lines of "Song of Myself", if you didn't catch it there, keep encouraged, some where it should make common sense.

When neuroscientists demonstrated the ability to reason is inseparable from emotion, it's as though the mask had been ripped off the the so called "Age of Reason" and revealed the ugly face of pride. After that we began to move into the realm of the prophets (who've been contending with human passions through the centuries) and so began a race to connect the dots and the question of freedom or slavery may be in the balance.

Whitman had attempted to put us on track: Of physiology from top to toe I sing,/ Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the/ Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far. In 2002, I'd cracked the Whitman code, so to speak, and since then the Muse of ectatic imagination and creative inspiration enabled the creation of a hypothetical basis for a spiritual movement to get the country back on track. This I tried to articulate in the past blog entries beginning May 17 through July 4.

Herein lies the danger. One can be sympathetic to human nature but not human freedom. Humans evolved in a hunting and gathering society where they could feel as a collective that enables to keep individual passions in check. Since then societies have become increasingly complex leaving the individual feeling isolated. One may use sound reason and say, poor human, he can't help but follow his destructive passions, he needs a set of chains.

My essential message is that by way of the arts and the imagination, humans can feel as being part of a collective by way of the human spirit to enable individual passions to be kept in check. To date, Americans have sustained a certain degree of freedom but with the jails overcrowding and the limits of economic expansion called into question, the future is dubious. In times of fear and insecurity, often the tendency of human nature is to court authoritarian regimes, which can come from either the political left or right, to lay down the law in coercive measures. Yet I do not wish to cause any unnecessary alarm as these are models and projections of human nature relative to society in all its complexities.

A View from the Precipice: Freedom balanced by Love

I believe history is on the side of freedom. We are free to live for only our own self and not without sound reason do we do so. But there's no getting away from the fact that we're social beings tied to the earth; there's no getting away from what one might call the soul. Ideologies that exonerate freedom at the expense of others and nature disgraces freedom and, ultimately, jeopardizes it as well.

It is often said, with freedom comes responsibility. While I believe that's true, in my vision freedom ultimately must be sustained by love. Human history appears to be in a flux between the individual and the collective; and individual freedom is ultimately balanced by love for the collective, or collective 'spirit'. Here we must make greater use of the talents and gifts of our poets.

To my view, the modern era appears as that of an adolescent, young adult time. Free to create a sentimental, self-indulgent idea of our selves apart from others and nature, full of our reason, confident in our scientific reductionism, thinking ourselves old enough to do away with childish myths, we struck out towards that distant land in the pride of the self. Granted freedom, we thought we could live a life of self-interest if only other people would be more educated, more reasonable, or more responsible. But as I see it, human salvation will never come through an individualistic ideal, whether based on reason, morality, or the propagation of media images; human salvation comes through greater realization of our collective nature.

On the trail of the poetic genius, we come to the parable of the prodigal son, a story that ripely lends itself to a collective narrative towards a kind of spiritual movement. Yet I find myself sympathetic to the plight of the prodigal son and one senses the father is as well. Because by going off into the distant land, one learns more of the wisdom of the father than had they never ventured out there. Not like how the modernist who looks down on the middle ages as the so called "dark ages", I expect we'll look back at the modern era with dramatic sympathy, marked by tragedy and triumph, a period of learning nonetheless.

Through the promotion of a collective narrative, it can provide an invitation difficult to refuse, or difficult to disengage from. It casts roles that others may find in themselves, including those who reject it. While marked by an air of festivity, it calls into question one's sense of self, eroding away at the false pedestal, and enables an awakening towards the truth of our plight and the individuals role in its outcome. All together, the project provides a hypothetical basis for a spiritual movement capable of purging pride from the land, or at least to a critical degree towards the restoration of harmony and balance.

Providing a Collective Narrative

Come Out and Dance

Strike up the music of the band
Prepare the way for the fatted calf
The prodigal son is coming home.

He’s tired of slaving in the mud
While all his gifts and all his love
Go wasted on his mortal pride.

So turn that water into wine,
Long live spirit and death to pride.
The rebel son is homeward bound.

Spread the news across the land
Come out and sing, come out and dance
The age of poetry has begun.

Come share your gifts and I’ll share mine
We’ll build on something worthy of time
And the triumph of the Spirit will be won.

Better to look the fool than be the fool
Having learned the wisdom of the rule
To love each other as you love yourself.

Come dear brother, take my hand,
A house divided cannot stand.
It’s time we were a family once again.

Charity for all and malice toward none,
Come welcome home the prodigal son
Tomorrow we’ll work the fields again.

Come sing the human spirit above
All that divides and occludes our love:
Love each other as you love yourself.

So strike up the music of the band
We’re blazing a trail for the Promised Land:
Heaven on earth lies within you.

Transcending the Land of the Dead

"True Vision is never wholly personal and by its nature needs to be shared." -- Hopi Elders

The reader would be right to be skeptical. As we come to a precipice in the trail, if one can catch a glimpse of the Promised Land, one can also see obstacles that lie ahead even more clearly. Yet I feel compelled, at least on some level, to promote this poetic approach to human progress because, if in truth I have a gift for vision, it is something that needs to be shared.

It seems we've lost our way as a society and appears we've found ourselves in the land of the dead. While this analogy can refer to the environmental challenges that appear before us, it also makes reference to a certain death of the spirit. Individuals die but only the collective lives; to live for the pride of the self with disregard for the greater collective is to live a life of the walking dead. To be sure, it's a complex society and where we go from here is less clear.

As it appears to me, we can begin to transcend the consumer culture by turning our attention to our contribution. Each of us has a unique body, a unique personal experience, a unique perspective; consequently, each of us has a unique contribution. By providing a collective vision (i.e., "the Promised Land") we begin to move our consciousness from a culture of individual consumption and toward a culture of collective contribution.

We then provide a collective narrative, drawn from the mythos, to be promoted in various forms. By interjecting this narrative with the arts, with particular emphasis on the communal arts of music and dancing, we can then lend rhthym to action in the promotion of community spirit in the context of the human spirit. Simultaneously, we are transforming our consciousness towards the joys of our collective nature.

Because we're all in the process of unsocializing ourselves, we'll be in the somewhat odd situation of trying to win over others to our cause while trying to win over our own selves (including yours truly). But in such a dispostion, we can maintain our sense of humility. Because we're trying to restore faith in our human nature, we're essentially promoting others as we promote our selves.

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love.” -- Thornton Wilder

The Merging of Mainstream American Culture with its Indigenous Culture

At the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, there's an original letter written in Walt Whitman's own hand that extols his countrymen and women to break the habit of always looking to Europe for the future and look instead to its own native influences, including its Native Americans. In this entry, I'll cite the catholic priest William Stolzman who does just this as described in his book, The Pipe and Christ. Stolzman's parish was on the Pine Ridge Reservation and there he chaired a series of dialogues concerning the Lakota and Christian religions. In his book, Stolzman argues, successfully I believe, in the compatible and complementary attributes of both religions. In the beginning of the book, Stoltzman describes the Lakota way of dialogue in the following excerpt:

In the Lakota way, speakers introduce themselves. Only after that do they proceed to the matter at hand. In telling their personal histories and related incidents, they display their attitudes and feelings toward those events and, more important, the impact those events have had on them. Thus their comments are spoken from a definite context, with definite attitudes which give their remarks a special integrity, meaning, wisdom and depth. Thus the hearer is able to appreciate both the experiences, preferences, and limitations of each speaker. Through their personal introductions, the speakers respectfully recognize that others may know other truths because others have different experiences and relationships to what is being talked about.

As the mainstream culture strives to become more Christlike as articulated in Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life, it would be well served to examine the Lakota disposition as described above. Each of us has a limited perspective and yet a unique perspective shaped by personal experience. Given the heated public discourse and ideological division in the political sphere, we should ask ourselves, have we sold out our unique perspective, to be conveyed in a disposition of love and humility, to bleat someone else's ideology? We live in an increasingly complex society that's ripe for purveyors of simplistic ideologies that unnecessarily sow division and discord among the people.

The Problem of Pride

The Promised Land Project strives to restore a sense of divine purpose to our culture in part by tracing the poetic genius as it reflects the course of human evolution and provides a projection of where we need to go as a society. Prior to the Civil War, the nineteenth-century American poets and artists sensed a promised land at a time of westward expansion. In poems such as Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855) and paintings such as "Kindred Spirits"(1849) one can still sense and long for this promised land. Yet in each example one can also sense the problem of pride.

Here I define the problem of pride as the setting of one's self apart from others and nature, a state of being we are socialized into to some degree. The problem of pride has lent itself in the twentieth-century to demoralization and environmental degradation (see blog entry of June 14). Here in the twenty-first century, as it appears to me, the situation can be redressed by a kind of spiritual movement as I've articulated in previous blog entries.

In the religious sphere, books like Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life are important contributions towards achieving Christlike love and humility, the antithesis of pride. Yet a broader approach is needed and we can look to other cultures in time and space to enable our society to achieve a state of balance and harmony. By appreciating tragedy in the poetry of Ancient Greece as reflected in the drama Sophocles' Ajax, for example, we can glimpse how we can truly feel love for our enemies by way of the human spirit.

Leading up to the excerpt as follows, the Goddess Athena has cast a spell on Ajax, sealing his doom, because he'd plotted to kill Odysseus. We pick up the dialogue after Athena reveals the situation to Odysseus:

Athena: Do you see, Odysseus, how great the gods' power is? Who was more full of foresight than this man, Or abler, do you think, to act with judgment?

Odysseus: None that I know of. Yet I pity his wretchedness, though he is my enemy, for the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him. I think of him, yet also of myself; for I see the true state of all us that live -- we are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.

Athena: Look well at this, and speak no towering word yourself against the gods, nor walk too grandly because you hand is weightier than another's, or your great wealth deeper founded. One short day inclines the balance of all human things to sink or rise again. Know that the god love men of steady sense and hate the proud.

While our mythos is different than that of ancient Greece, or the simple recognition of the mind's ability to cause a false perception, the above example can lend itself to the creation and reproduction of art towards a new era.