The contrast is very stark: Authoritarian powers and dupes of leaders are falling like dominoes around the world.  Those hanging onto their power through iron-fisted control tremble in the face of something brewing beyond their control.  Even in our own supposedly democratic government, there is exposed the most glaring self-centeredness, the most disgusting disregard of the people, there is a growing deep distaste and shame about the people who inhabit the bodies of our national legislature.

They serve their purpose.  They serve to enlighten us about the nature of real power.

Real power rests with the people – always has – but people, for the most part, are not aware of it.

Despots have always, with their armies and thrones and scepters, been deposed by one person.

The crumbling of the government in Libya began with the self-immolation of one person in a small out-of-the-way town.  Harry Potter took on the overwhelming combined forces of evil, as did Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

One person, fully engaged, fully empowered, can defeat millions.

This is our story, too, each one of us.  There is a new future unfolding, unimagined as yet by hardly anyone, and the ground will be broken by individuals all over the globe combining their power in unseen ways to create a new world.

None of the old world will be left standing.

A new undercurrent, a new sub-stratum is being formed.  It is the heart of the universe finally revealing itself and coming to fruition.  It is humanity transformed.

The upheavals take place, chaos seems to reign; but it is only the beginning of new life poking through the ground, new flowers breaking through even the most encrusted earth.

It will take time.  But what is coming is a cause for joy.

"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of  “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization” .

These famous words of Thomas Paine from his pamphlet “The Crisis”, written during the American Revolutionary War, stirred the spirit of all Americans of that difficult time.

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The words might as well have been uttered today.

Paine lived and wrote amid two great revolutions: The American Revolution, and the French Revolution.  Worlds were crumbling, and new worlds were coming into being, and he was active in facilitating both.

He was unrelenting in his opposition to tyranny, whether in the political realm, the social realm, or the religious realm.  His words were bolts of lightning, shaking up the status quo.

His pamphlet “Common Sense”, advocating independence from the tyranny of England at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, sold an estimated 500,000 copies, an astronomical number at the time; and President John Adams reportedly said that without that book, “The sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

He was equally bold in his attack on institutionalized religion.  He wrote:

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

He lived up to his definition of faith, when he wrote:

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

We need the spirit of Tom Paine in today’s world.  For all of his feistiness, he was a remarkable patriot.

Worlds are again crumbling, and new worlds are again being called forth into being.  A new revolution is needed.

The Dream of America that lay only dimly expressed in the time of Paine, the real, true America that would come to embody the dreams of people everywhere – justice, humanity, equality, compassion – seems almost lost now as America and the world around sinks under the weight and retribution of greed gone amok, and countries and peoples fracture into warring hostile camps.

Yet this is the moment when the tide turns.

Out of all the chaos and despair, a new world is slowly being born, a new civilization, born out of an awakening to our true place in the cosmos.

This is coming to fruition in America. It is inevitable.

It is the compassionate heart of the universe itself coming to fruition and bloom.

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"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of  “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization” .

At New York’s Stock Exchange, we suddenly see hundreds of people, young and old, protesting greed, protesting banks and bankers, protesting the stock market, protesting something almost indefinable now in the air in America.

It is despair, it is disgust, with our own government.

A new poll out today shows only eleven percent of Americans now approve of our government, an all-time low.

Who do these several hundred people represent?  They represent the other eighty-nine percent who think something is terrible wrong about the workings of our government and the people who supposedly represent us.

These eighty-nine percent represent the complete spectrum of American society today.   What they have in common is that they all feel that our government, in one way or another, does not represent them and their best interests.  What many of them feel is that no one in government cares.

Money rules, they feel.  They sense  that, more and more, it is only money that rules, and that the situation is getting worse.  And that our government is set up in such a way that it is well nigh impossible to change this drift toward total oligarchy.

And, strangely, we now have people clamoring on the right – the Tea Party – who actually feel that the answer is to bring down the government, get rid of it totally. Let’s get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, maybe even Social Security and Health Care, they say.  This plays into the hands of money even more.  Get rid of all type of government that supports people, all regulation that protects people and the unbridled onslaught of greed, and then we will have a happier world.

It is a vision that is totally lacking in compassion.  It is a retreat into mean spiritedness and a dead and dying past.

This revolution in the streets is going to grow.  There is something new coming.

It is a revolution within the hearts of men and women everywhere.

It will take time.  Even now, it is happening.

And as it unfolds, the external world we have known, the politics, the social setting, the economics – everything – will be transformed.

_____________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.

The old ways are no longer holding.

Autocracy is on its way out; democracy on the way in.

But it is not the same old jaded type of democracy that we have known up until this point.  This is something new.  It is really a revolution of the sort we have never known before.

It is only a vague yearning in the minds of the masses involved in the uprisings. More freedom, more jobs, less oppression, equality, and so on.  But that is not really it.

This revolution is not only confined to the Arab world.  Here in the United States, we are on the verge of a similar revolt.  Our government is divided and dysfunctional, almost everyone agrees.  Our leaders are out of touch.  No one seems to care.

What is it that we all really want?

It is not simply a revolution from our leaders.  We keep changing our leaders, and the results keep coming out the same.  The Arabs will change their leaders, and the results will keep coming out the same.

What we really desire – all of us in the human family – is something so breathtaking, so painful, so difficult, that we cannot yet quite imagine what it is.

It is nothing less than a change in the life-state of humanity.

Individual after individual has to grow into a larger recognition of self and others and our place in this vast universe.

This is, of course, the realm of the spirit or religion.

And that is exactly what is required.  Unless we can expand our identity to include the entire human race, each person, each man, woman and child, we will never break free of the bonds that bind us.  We imagine our woes to be in a government, in legislators, in rulers; but, in fact, the devils that siphon off our happiness and freedom are of our own making.

We have to grow.  All of us have to grow.

This is truly the challenge.  Nothing else will suffice this time.

It is a painstaking, slow process, but nothing else will do.
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"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.  His website is http://www.jimhilgendorf.org.

“Washington, D.C., you’d think by now they’d get the message.  An earthquake.  A hurricane.  Are you listening?  The American people have done everything they can.  Now it’s time for an act of God and we’re getting it.”

Her comments connecting earthquakes, hurricanes, and God, may or may not have been made in jest, as she claims; but she is not the first to see natural disasters as acts of God, and retribution for certain human behavior.

When hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, a nationally known preacher claimed that the hurricane’s destruction was God’s retribution for homosexuality in the city.

(Of course, when intense heat and drought fry Texas and the south, and tornadoes tear up the Midwest, no such assertions are forthcoming).

However off-base and ignorant such remarks may be, they point to something undeniable – a relationship between people and nature.  But it is not a relationship of some omnipotent, angry God who takes sides on issues of sexuality or politics, and indiscriminately punishes the opposing team. Rather, it points to a much deeper relationship, and a conclusion that even science and quantum physics have corroborated over and over: Our environment and ourselves are in some strange way inseparable.  At the deepest level, they are one.

In Buddhism, this is called ‘esho funi’ – two, but not two.  In the depths of life, they are one.

This is why Buddhism always looks for an answer to every problem in the environment – be it personal, husband and wife, employee and boss, or societal, like the larger problems plaguing us as a nation and human collective – by trying to effect change within individuals.

Society as a whole seems to be headed for a kind of insanity.  Our politics are polarized, inept, and angry.  Care for people seems overridden by the forces of power and greed. Ideologies clash, leaving the people abandoned, struggling for hope.

The heavens and the earth show the same increasing unbalance.  Heat, cold, storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, fracturing of societies, rebellions, genocides, famine, war, as though the entire world were beginning to go mad.

Rage in the heavens is not a personal God meting out retribution; but rather a clear mirror reflecting the gathering chaos within the human mind and heart.  ’Esho funi’ – two, but not two.

And who are the greatest culprits?  Those who, with religious fire, separate us into opposing camps: God and the devil; sinners and saved, heterosexual and homosexual, black and white, one religion against another, good and bad.

These are the ones who crucify God, causing winds to blow and torrential downpours and droughts and whirlwinds and the drying up of waters and tectonic plates shifting and huge waters galloping across the oceans and madness in the heavens.

For God (whatever you call it) is all of us, it is the universe itself, forged out of opposites, but one.  At heart, one.

The mirror of the world shows us our pain and hatred and separation and greed and anger and delusion.

We have to work hard on becoming one.

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"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.  His website is http://www.jimhilgendorf.org.

Image via Wikipedia

A week ago, Dennis Kucinich gave a speech in Seattle.  It is about a new America, and the Dream of America.  It is about the kind of America we all yearn for, and envision for our children.

Draw your own conclusions.  Here is the speech:

Hello Seattle.

On this day, in this place of great beauty we celebrate the beauty of nature. The wondrous nature of each other. Our presence here binds us as a community. It empowers us. It strengthens us. We become most visible, en mass. We extend our reach. We sense new possibilities. And the creative spark which births action can usher in a new world.

Open America! Show yourself! Mass action! This is why, and how, recent movements for freedom in Tunisia and Egypt gained momentum. This is how Gandhi’s march to the sea cast off the British Empire. This is how America’s suffragettes gained for women the right to vote. This is how Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington became a pivotal moment in the history of the civil rights movement.

People became visible. They went to the streets. They linked arms. They marched. They sang: “We Shall Overcome”. They walked the uplit path of social and economic justice. They marched to glory, not for themselves, but for generations to come.

We gather in a common determination for change. A sense of commonality of purpose awakens. An awareness grows. The moment arrives to exercise a new commitment to cast off an old order of things. This same awareness brought America’s founders to put in writing a Declaration of Independence to proclaim “A New Order Follows”. Today it is not a financial deficit that will bring America down, it is a deficit of public action. When people discover what happens when one person determines to make a difference and then merges with the many like-minded, new possibilities unfold.

Seattle, you understand this. Because in 1999, tens of thousands of citizen activists, including Teamsters and “Turtles”, coursed through nearby streets on behalf of social and economic justice. They marched. They chanted. They sang: We Shall Overcome, and Solidarity Forever!” They spoke of Union. Acting in unity their presence was felt.

The Seattle WTO protests shined light upon the World Trade Organization’s workings. Seattlites, union members and trade activists helped spark a world-wide awareness that trade agreements must have enforceable workers’ rights, human rights and environmental quality principles. You identified the child labor, slave labor and prison labor that was driving international corporate profits. While the cause of justice in our trade agreements has yet to be served, you, Seattle brought it forward. You nurtured it. You kept it alive.

Large, intentional gatherings can be a catalyst for dramatic change. But only if we are prepared, as George Bernard Shaw wrote, “to dream things that never were and ask: ‘Why not?’ Let us dream about the America we want. And let us give our dreams firmament.

Let our dreams, our thoughts, become words. Let our words become deeds. Let our deeds bring action. Let our actions build a new America and a new world.

Seattle, you shook the world once, can you shake it again? Will you?

Are you prepared to declare and demand, here and now that it is time that the United States brings an end to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?

Are you prepared to demand our troops be brought home?

Are you prepared to demand America end our world-wide military presence?

Are you prepared to demand America must lead the world in the abolition of nuclear weapons?

Are you prepared to demand the Patriot Act must be repealed?

Are you prepared to demand that government spying, eavesdropping, and wiretapping of law abiding citizens must end?

That our sisters’ Right to Privacy be protected and decisions about women’s reproductive health be between a woman and her doctor?

Are you prepared to demand that our brothers and sisters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered have equal rights, including the right to marry?

Are you prepared to demand we decriminalize and legalize marijuana, demand hospitalization not incarceration for those with drug problems?

Are you prepared to demand Not-for-profit Health Care for All?

Education for All?

Retirement Security for All?

Jobs for All?

Are you prepared to rescue our federal government from corporate interests by calling for a constitutional amendment which establishes only public financing of federal elections?

Are you prepared to rescue our planet, to protect our air, water, and land from further exploitation by demanding an end to drilling the earth, fracking the earth, cracking the earth, and end to poisoning the seas and the skies with carbon based energies, and a rapid transition to an environmentally friendly, socially responsible green economy?

This day, here and now, you have now voiced the Seattle Declaration. Let the sound of your voice be heard far and wide. Let your affirmations give birth to new actions, a new nation and a new world. Let your voice cause America to march. Let your voice cause America to sing. Let your voice cause America to seek new freedoms. Let your voice cause America to seek a newer world. Ours is a restless quest for freedom. We know wars make us less free. Fear makes us less free. Social and economic insecurity makes us less free. If it is for freedom’s sake we gather, so then let it be for freedom’s sake that we act!

Our individual desire for change carries extraordinary power to become more than we are. Better than we are. Forged in the human heart, ignited by love and passion for transformation, our common unity, our common purpose and our common action carry the power to change everything. This is the power of human unity. This is the power of our Oneness. Feel it. Own it. Act upon it

Thank you Seattle.

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"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.  His website is http://www.jimhilgendorf.org.

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• The Seattle Declaration (billspeasoup.wordpress.com)

When we speak of a new religion, red flags go up in peoples’ minds.  A new religion signifies something opposed to current religious belief.  It denotes something foreign.

And it is foreign, in the sense that it is an opening into a new realm, a state of life and being that is beyond what we usually have come to expect.

Religion, in our most intimate sense, connotes something established, something chiseled in stone, something smacking of antiquity and time and dogma and impenetrable mystery, an establishment of unquestionable law and authority.

But religion is a constantly changing way of relating to the eternal, of making sense of our lives amid the overwhelming immensity of the universe around and the seeming senselessness of daily living.

Christianity opened up this world amid the crumbling ruins of the Roman State. And today, amid the growing chaos of the world around us, a new religion is demanded, a new spirituality, a new way of relating to the cosmos that makes new sense.

This new religion, this new spirituality, must be global in scope.  There is no more room for a tribal consciousness, no room for us and the other, black and white, us and them, tribal religions.  This has been the source of much of the world’s grief.  Even now, the world’s dominant religions are lined up on battle lines – Christian, Jew, Muslim.  They are, indeed, headed for Armageddon.

No, the new religion for this age, and for the ages to come, is something new – all-embracing of peoples, recognizing the simple human being in everyone, no distinctions of race or color or sex or nationality.  We are becoming one people, and the religion we need recognizes this, and reinforces this reality.

Gone are the days of authoritarianism.

The new religion is a spirituality that is sprouting among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and agnostics and atheists.  It is a recognition that the most sacred of all things – Life, itself – exists and expresses itself through the life of each and every human being on the face of the planet.  All of life is sacred.  Life, itself, is to be honored.  The human being is be honored as he or she is.

All of life’s forces should be directed to the enhancement of humanity itself.

This is the religion of the future.  It is a religion beyond religion.  It is a religion beyond names.

It is based on behavior, and the cherishing of life.

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"The Buddha and The Dream of America", by James Hilgendorf.

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.

The after effects of that first atomic bomb still linger on in the psyche of the world, especially in the United States.

At the end of the War, a scenario was scripted and promoted by the U. S. government, which basically argued that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and later on Nagasaki, was a necessary step to end the war.  The story went that if the United States had not dropped the Bomb, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of additional lives would have been lost, many of them among the United States and Allied forces.  This was not true, as attested later even by Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces, who deeply regretted the dropping of the Bomb, stating that Japan was already defeated and ready to surrender.

There were many voices decrying the accuracy and legitimacy of the need to drop the Bomb; but even today, this myth and story still survives among the public, primarily because they have never been told the truth.

Then there are those, whose number is still legion, who feel that the dropping of the Bomb was well deserved and appropriate.  After all, they cry, the Japanese started the War, and even before World War II, the Japanese had committed great atrocities in places like China.  They deserved what they got.

There is no arguing that the facts about the Japanese starting the War and the other atrocities are true.  But this is to overlook the main point that should be at the center of a discussion about atomic weapons.

They are horrific weapons, beyond any type of weapon that has ever been conceived, and their use is an abomination and desecration of everything human, not only concerning the victims, but also as regards those who used them.  The humanity of both victim and user is utterly destroyed.

The user of these weapons, additionally, bears the most guilt and shame.

This is perhaps why there is still such an enormous resistance to admitting that we – these people of the United States, a country and a people we would like to position above the fray – are capable of such an abominable cruelty and horror.

The real truth is that anyone who uses these satanic weapons against people anywhere on this planet is a murderer, in the first degree.  This is the real point, which we dodge and maneuver in any way we can to avoid the uncomfortable truth.

In the video below, you can see the destruction caused by the Bomb, and the story of one survivor.

May we never have to celebrate another August 6th event, ever.

James Hilgendorf is the author of “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“, “The Buddha and the Dream of America”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.

The talk is of revamping Social Security and Medicare on the one hand, and raising taxes on the other, and there seems to be no middle ground.  The Democrats take one side, the Republicans the other.  At issue, in between, is the possibility of the credit rating of the United States going under, and economic chaos.  Both sides, up front, say they do not want that to ever happen.

But there is a growing segment of House Republicans – gathering under the umbrella of the Tea Party and other newly elected conservatives – who openly champion just that scenario.

Michele Bachmann, now a front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, openly states that she would not vote to raise the debt ceiling.  Period.  And she is backed by others, by a more and more rabid group of Republicans and conservatives whose main objectives are (1) to destroy the Presidency of Barack Obama by any means necessary, and (2) to destroy entitlements like Social Security and Medicare completely.

If the debt ceiling is not raised, and the United States of America loses its credit rating, interest rates rise for everyone, business suffers terribly, and also the government cannot meet its payroll, Social Security and Medicare payments do not go out, and people are hurt badly.

This is one scenario we are staring in the face.  But the likes of Bachmann do not care.  They are quite willing to let this scenario unfold.

At the very heart of this stance is something the Republican Party has been drooling to to do ever since the Depression years when Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats enacted Social Security, and ever since Medicare was pushed through Congress:  Destroy both of them.

If many, many people are hurt, if the safety net we have labored so hard to put in place, is destroyed, then that is just fine.  This is just fine with many of these new Republicans, this new insidious breed of callous politicians whose primary god is the money and power and greed of the wealthy, and the destruction of a President who does not think like them, look like them, feel like them, believe like them.

This country is moving toward a possible crackup.  It is schizophrenia of the body politic.

It is the death rattle of the old America – the America of apple pie and a narrow, backward-looking and dying vision of this country.  It is the death rattle, but it is dangerous, and it would like to drag down everything and everyone with it if it goes.

Beware.

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James Hilgendorf is the author of four books: “The Great New Emerging Civilization”; “The New Superpower”; “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective”; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America”.  His books are available through bookstores, or online as paperbacks or e-books at Amazon.com, or through the publisher, The Tribute Series.

In “Democratic Vistas”, he wrote:

“I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current age, our States.  But woe to the age and land in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas.  As fuel to flame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism – even this democracy of which we make so much – unerringly feed the highest mind, the soul.”

Walt Whitman

This dream of an America of almost mythic, spiritual proportions, some would say, is outdated, a vision that was spawned in a much simpler time.  Today’s society, they argue, takes place in a totally different time and dimension, much too complex for Whitman’s grandiose ideas.

The American Dream, and the Dream of America, today is a dream that for too many has grown empty and hollow, engendering a sense of loss.  The economic malaise gnawing at our lives has left many feeling left out of anything that even resembles our American Dream.

But this is really the time for the America of Whitman’s dreams – the real America – to emerge.  It has been buried and waiting in the wings for too long.

At the heart of Whitman’s Dream of America was the individual, and the individual awakened to a larger spiritual life connecting all people to the cosmos itself, and to Eternity.

He wrote:

“That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of eternity, of of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea.  And again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever – the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things – wherefrom I feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning – and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.”

This is the America, and the Dream of America, that is poised now to emerge. Amid the chaos, amid the tension and loss of hope, amid the war and devastation that has become the very norm of our national collective life, this Dream is being given shape and form.  As yet, it lives only in the hearts of individual men and women; but slowly it will gather in the march of legions.

It is the universe finally coming to fruition and bloom.

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James Hilgendorf is the author of four books, the latest being “The Buddha and the Dream of America”.  His other books include “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective”; “The New Superpower”; and “The Great New Emerging Civilization”.  The books are available through bookstores or online at The Tribute Series.  The books are also available in e-book format through Amazon.com.