So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as His own people. He will command a blessing on us in our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than we have formerly known. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, and ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies. The Lord make our name a praise and glory, so that men shall say of succeeding plantations: "The Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are on us.
--John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630) 2

Americans seem to be in their own land as pilgrims, prodded by a dream. They are always on the move--available for new tasks, prepared for the possible loss of what they have. They are not settled, installed...
--Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America 3

The Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation...[Thus] in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves.... Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the Egyptians; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.... God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.... Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us. -- Herman Melville, White Jacket (1850) 4

This land was placed here by some divine plan. It was placed here to be found by a special kind of people, a new breed of humans called an American...[destined] to begin the world over again...[and to] build a land here that will be for all mankind a shining city on a hill. --Ronald Reagan, Debate with Jimmy Carter (1980) 5

America and Evolution of Consciousness 6

In his lecture on the modern mind at the threshold, Richard Tarnas summarized competing interpretations of the course of Western thought and culture: according to the dominant story, the West continues on an ascent, on the well-established curve of progress made possible by rationality and scientific thinking; according to the other, more recent story, the West is a tragedy brought on by the myth of progress and the disastrous effects of alienation, technology and gender imbalance. An audience at a conference on "Science and Spirituality" sponsored by the International Transpersonal Association is presumably ready to agree that neither adequately describes the present situation. To achieve a more complete and balanced interpretation of the contemporary West--and particularly the phase dominated by American culture--we would do well to affirm and extend the framework introduced by Richard Tarnas in his Passion of the Western Mind.7 This lecture/essay places these stories in a more explicit account of the evolution of consciousness with particular reference to the mission of America and attempts to read this evolutionary process by means of transpersonal disciplines and capacities.

This interpretation of the spiritual mission of America is intended as an exploration to be guided by various transpersonal ideas and ideals. Transpersonal assumptions, skills and aspirations can now be brought to bear on the culture within which transpersonalism has emerged--and in essential relation with which it will undoubtedly develop. Transpersonalism will be needed increasingly if we are to understand and redirect a culture which has much more power than wisdom. There is overwhelming evidence that America--by which I mean the United States --is greatly lacking in wisdom, out of balance and approaching self-destruction concerning the ecosystem, gender, generations, health, education and its sense of justice.

What, if anything, can one say that is redeeming of this culture? The "American way of life," which appears mostly to do with goods and services, continues to increase its domination throughout the world. Wherever it is imitated American economic energy brings with it American short-sightedness, rapaciousness, neglect of healthy daily rhythms and an alienation from the inner life. Both at home and in its influence abroad, American culture shows itself to be at an adolescent stage of development: it looks ahead with idealism, passion and confidence, but with inadequate insight nor foresight.

Cultures which are increasingly influenced by America will need to discern whether its superficiality and materialism represent the substance of the American psyche, or whether it also has a deeper tradition and deeper capacities. I am affirming America's appalling selfishness and violence, and affirming as well its profound psychic or karmic task on behalf of a true individualism, one which celebrates the individual in relation to salvific communities. This ideal of the individual-in-relation is not only consistent with service to the community and the earth, it actually fosters such service. America's recent egregious failings can and should be evaluated and corrected in light of this transformative ideal which it carries on behalf of evolving humanity.

To understand America in this context, we need to penetrate its exterior, its surface, to its inner life, its psyche and spiritual mission. We need to move past its limited sight to its vision. To do this, we ourselves will need to exercise vision as well as sight. From the start of this culture with the arrival of European settlers on the east coast in the early seventeenth century and their genocidal impact on indigenous peoples, this vision has been in jeopardy. Yet the vision and potentiality endure: however dimly perceived in daily life, and however imperiled, this ideal of the individual nevertheless remains America's sacred task and the essential contribution it is attempting to make to the evolution of human consciousness.

As our understanding of America's karmic task presupposes that we understand the destiny of other cultures, a few comparisons might prove helpful. The Indo-Buddhist karmic task, for example, concerns the ideals of selflessness and enlightenment, or simply selfless enlightenment. It is because the exemplars of the Asian spiritual tradition have long proven successful at realizing this ideal that spiritual seekers in the West are increasingly convinced of the efficacy of Asian spiritual teachings and practices. Hebraic consciousness is characterized by dialogue with the providential God Yahweh. It is this dialogical relationship with the Creator and Judge of all human beings which is the shared core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One of the karmic tasks of ancient Greek culture was the development of a different kind of thinking. The Greeks took it to be their solemn duty to think with such dedication that they regarded thinking as the highest human achievement. In addition to creating logic, a discipline for the laws of thinking, they developed the concept of contemplative thinking--i.e., thinking which by its own activity leads the human being to the highest state of happiness.

Christian consciousness has concerned the relationship between immanence, or the divine within, and transcendence, or divine beyond. At the core of that religious and cultural tradition is the concept and experience of the Logos, or Christos, a divine being whose incarnation brought about the possible transformation of the whole of humanity. Through the ages, Christians have had difficulty articulating and experiencing this ideal polarity of divine immanence and transcendence.

Modern Western thought and culture has had the distinctive karmic task of establishing the laws governing nature and the material world. At the core of the effort to understand and control nature--and control characterizes scientific thinking--the modern Western genius expounded a bifurcation of mind and matter. American culture has inherited this dualism, and its major thinkers have sought to overcome it. Transpersonalism can perhaps best be understood as continuous with the attempt of the classical American philosophical tradition--from Emerson to Dewey, or from the 1830's to 1930's--to reunite the mental and the physical.

In contemporary American culture, individualism is associated with anti-community values, with the conventional male ideal of the solitary hero. The popular idea of individualism, like the prevalent idea of freedom, is tied to wanting one's own--one's own way, one's own space, one's own style, one's own income and security, one's own control of family and relationships. There is a strong tradition, from Edwards to contemporary Transpersonalism, however, which espouses an individualism of context and relation. Whether transcendentalist or transpersonalist, founding fathers or the civil rights movement, the deepest and most distinctive American ideal of the individual is one which affirms the universal and community as sources and goals of individual development.

Whereas the popular conception has celebrated the independent, the classical view celebrates the interdependent. The new paradigm view of the human being is significantly closer to the classical view than to the popular view. This new paradigm ideal of the individual would be strengthened if its exponents recognized their philosophical assumptions to be similar to distinctively American images of the individuals. The individualism of both transcendentalism and transpersonalism concerns the self in the context of progressively larger contexts--and ultimately in relation to a universal reality. Whereas the ideal of freedom in popular rhetoric aims at license to fulfill the needs of personality, the ideal of freedom in Emerson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and in transpersonalism, is rooted in the freedom which the individual can create only in and through an altered sense of self, one which lifts the personality to an intimate bond with the trans-personal.

The primary obstacle to a genuine ideal of individualism and freedom is not a competing idea of community, but a materialistic idea of both the individual and the community. Materialism in this context refers to the increasingly definitive American penchant for having, controlling and moving the fullest possible supply of goods and services. In this culture, "having" increasingly threatens to replace "being" as the preeminent human motive. The alarming number of religious leaders and groups which use God and creed in the service of imperialism, intolerance of pluralism and unquestioning embrace of technological manipulation confirms the depth of the American commitment to materialism. Contemporary American culture is presently pleased with itself for having prevailed in the Cold War combat with communism, but by its celebration of materialism, passion for competition and its passive acceptance of economic injustice, American capitalism also deadens the spirit. To the extent capitalist individualism will continue to favor the economy over ecology, education, culture, and creativity, it will continue to undermine America and its imitators.

The mission of America serves as an example or an exhibit within the vast and controversial process here referred to as the evolution of consciousness. This interpretive framework is controversial not merely in its particulars but concerning the degree to which evolution of consciousness as such is an intelligible and effective framework. In contrast to the history of ideas, which is an academically established discipline, the evolution of consciousness framework can probably not be fully established without the aid of a transpersonal epistemology.

As a working assumption, the evolution of consciousness asserts that deep in our historical life, including the life of the planet and the life of humanity, there are appropriate tasks which beckon. Great figures in every culture have recognized (what better criterion of "great" might there be?) the nature and urgency of such karmic works. This is not to suggest that the tasks that a people take as their own are necessarily successful. Until recently, histories have been a compilation of successes, but it would be revealing to list the karmic tasks which a culture has failed to perform--whether because it lost its way, its balance, or its nerve. America seems to have the task of developing an individualism which can serve as a basis for community life, and for the critical relationship between humanity and the Earth. It is not clear whether America will eventually reverse its present course in time to make the contribution expected of it. To meet its responsibility to its karmic mission--and, indeed, to save itself and the planet from its rapacious exploitation of the earth's natural resources--America will first have to come to terms with the extent of its karmic debt to the groups it has exploited in the process of establishing its material success--and the negative influence it is exercising throughout the world.

It might appear tasteless, or even bizarre, to bring a positive case for the mission of America to this thousand-year-old city of extraordinary culture--in Charles University founded in 1348, here in this city represented symbolically throughout the world by Vaclav Havel, a leader of acclaimed moral sensibility. But perhaps America will be seen positively, as it apparently is by Vaclav Havel, if we look past the exported American culture, past its willful ignorance of ecological values, of the cultures and languages of other peoples, of its own increasingly disposable, trivialized value system, to its roots and its larger, if still unsuccessful, insight and mission.

It is ironic as well as tragic that America is far advanced in the process of violating its own land. When European settlers came to the shores of the so-called New World and created colonies in the midst of an ancient and well-established indigenous civilization, they brought with them passionate and sophisticated ideals, but what they found most significantly was land. It was this seemingly unlimited expanse of natural wonder which they trekked, chronicled in diaries, depicted in correspondence to loved ones in Europe, painted and of course inhabited. In the process, they broke the land to their will. In the past one hundred years Americans have exploited and defiled the land which had exercised so formative an influence on their ideals of freedom and individualism.

Although these colonists and Europeans referred to this land as the New World, it was not at all new: the land had been settled, and cultivated by inhabitants of a civilization many thousands of years old. It takes a special kind of chutzpah, to refer officially to an invasion as a discovery. This world, newly invaded and occupied, was also not new in that its new settlers brought with them a highly articulated culture, one based on the Bible, on new social and political ideals, and one which supported their belief in the importance of their mission. They brought ideas and they generated new ones. America may be unique in that it was founded on ideas, and it has been committed to the conviction that the human being is the creator of new and better ideas. This ideal is easily missed in the face of contemporary American mindlessness and passivity. But the mission has been constant, even when ill-served, to create a society in which individual human beings, like the Creator in whose image they believe themselves created, should experience themselves as creators. According to the American mission (whether considered to be vision, dream, myth, or realizable project), the human being is the creator of new ideas, and thereby of a new world.

The Europeans who settled the American colonies in the seventeenth century consciously set about creating--or co-creating with the land and the divine--a new culture, a new destiny, a New World. The tools for this creation included their belief in the Bible and the providential God revealed thereby, and their love of freedom from political oppression. At the core of this grand and complex experiment was a desperate longing for religious and civic freedom. Within a century and a half they created a political system, a polity, which combined the most advanced ideas of freedom and the dignity of the individual in dramatic and tragic competition with slavery, virtual genocide of the Indian inhabitants, oppression of women, and an attitude of exploitation which would subsequently constitute its shadow. The light and dark dimensions of the American saga are best understood when seen as polarities of the same complex mission--the creation of a new individualism, one rooted in a radical pluralism of values, lifestyles and communities.

It is essential that the dark side of the American story be candidly acknowledged, and if humanity--and, more urgently, the Earth--is to survive, that it be accepted and overcome. The bright side, however, must also to be acknowledged--and advanced. America as an ideal, as the representative of the free individual, has raised, and continues to symbolize, the most influential articulation of new, and extremely demanding criteria for the human community. The accepted or nearly accepted criteria for human rights, legal protection, access to power and information, as well as standards of integrity and propriety, are all far advanced over any previous age. This culture is making unprecedented demands on its leaders, as well as on parents and other care givers. Admittedly, the need for such protection may be greater in some respects, but the attempt to reach group consensus on rights and responsibilities governing education, health, and the ecosystem is a new level of achievement.

America is in the forefront of trying to reconcile the liberty and prosperity of competing individuals and groups. A partial list of such polar tensions awaiting reconciliation includes an unprecedented array of rights--psychological, financial, physical (including health and sexual orientation), aesthetic, and religious. I take it to be the spiritual mission of America to sustain the polarity, as harmoniously and equitably as possible, between freedom for individuals and groups, and a workable polity of laws and rights. For the polarity to survive, the entire American project will need to recover and deepen its own self-consciousness.

America will need to confront the character flaw which lies deep in its psyche, at the core of its karmic destiny. From its origin to the present, the diverse peoples of America have lived too comfortably with a double bifurcation of high and low ideals, as well as high and low practice. For nearly four centuries, they have striven to create a freer and more just society--as well as to exploit and conquer. The settlers who came to America did not necessarily, or uniformly, set out to kill Indians. In fact, however, when it came time to claim land that was occupied, the mental and moral values of many settlers enabled them to believe that they had a right to do so.8 In this decade immediately following the quincentary of the invasion of the Americas by Christian countries of Western Europe, it might at last be possible to require that we Euro-Americans look at, and acknowledge, its killing of hundreds of thousands of the indigenous peoples who walked wisely on this land. The responsibility for this incalculable crime remains at the shadow level of the American psyche. With respect to the Native Americans--even more than with respect to the Blacks--we live in self-deception. We who partake of America's privilege live with this lie in varying degrees of discomfort. The long accepted use of the term "discovery" for the invasion of land that had been inhabited for thousands of years, and use of the term "settled" for the extermination of the Indian civilization, are more powerful than lies because they remain repressed.

The second atrocity, one which is more in the common frame of reference in American life, is the century and a half of slavery followed by more than a century of racism resulting in an intolerable and dangerous situation commonly referred to as two nations, separate and unequal.9 Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia landowner who, of course, owned slaves, nevertheless expressed worry in his diaries concerning the long-range effect of this moral evil on American culture and destiny.10

America's third great failing consists in its systemic class- and gender-based injustices. As early American economic life was significantly built on slavery and the savage destruction of a vast network of indigenous cultures, it has also presupposed violence and injustice in treatment of women and the poor. It is only in this century that this withholding and violation of the rights of women has come to be recognized for the tragedy that it is. It is also painfully obvious that the largest group of poor who are victims of American exploitation and prejudice are the Central and South American peoples. America's three massive systemic injustices constitute a historical--and karmic--legacy which stands in the way of America realizing its spiritual mission.

The karma of a culture or a people, like the karma of an individual, represents the spiritual predispositions and tasks of a lifetime; a culture, at least as much as an individual, must come to terms with its essential deeds and their value consequences. A full participation in the American experiment would ideally include a commitment to its future mission--the realization of an enlightened, contextualized, free individualism--and, equally, a sense of responsibility for the full conscious transformation of America's three major crimes against humanity--slavery, virtual genocide of indigenous peoples, and systemic injustice against women and the poor. lthough each individual is not directly responsible for the crimes of "dead white men" (and women accomplices), by virtue of the national-cultural destiny which each individual American has either chosen or been assigned (by higher beings or parents, or both), these vast historical facts would seem to constitute the framework and actual content of our spiritual destiny as decisively as our gender, talents, beliefs and other life-deferring influences and tasks.

The seeds of America's failure were planted at the beginning of the national project, with mind-twisting rationalizations which supported slavery of Blacks and killing of Indians. As much as the deeds, the rationalizations have created the basis for the violence endemic in American society. Jefferson's concern as to how the republic would survive slavery proved prescient; almost a century later, Lincoln knew the answer:

More than a century after Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., showed that the republic has survived as two socio-economic nations. Karma is stubborn.

The negative effects of a false, primarily materialistic individualism and conception of freedom allow America to rationalize not only systemic violence but also opposition to any group or idea which strikes it as "other." Because of an increasingly strong habit of behaving at the level of appearances, Americans are prone at a minimum to devalue, and more often to oppose, other languages, other races, other ethnic groups, other generations--and in the case of males, almost invariably the other gender. This capacity for othering is rooted in a false individualism--the one which denies or neglects the universal ideal through which we can each trans-form our individual personality by trans-personal ideals and experiences.

Unfortunately, from their origin to the present, American ideals have been limited and distorted by their commitment in theory and deed to a paradigm of power, domination and exploitation. Its power and preeminence are inseparable from its high energy domination of natural resources and symbolic images--including stereotypical images of women, minorities, and the poor. Fortunately, America also has at its disposal, and has had throughout its history, more than ample expressions of ideals and methodologies by which it can overcome its tragic past and create a future worthy of its founding and its influence on world events.

Heralds of the American Vision

Just as America is celebrated for its practical knowledge rather than philosophical speculation, its vision is not so much a seeing of a distant or future ideal as it is a seeing of the next few practical steps. In both its knowing and seeing it tends toward the practical: it is concerned with knowing-how and seeing-how. Its philosophers and scientists, and other intellectuals and academics committed to knowledge, generally have one eye on the practical implications of their knowing. Those prized for vision tend to be those proven right with respect to the great challenges of the time. Pragmatism--the philosophical method which focuses on ends and consequences--should be understood as the distinctively American way of doing philosophy, and social and political figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., are seen in this tradition as teachers or sages of American philosophy no less than James and Dewey. It is precisely because James and Dewey were both thoroughly pragmatic and contemporaneous concerning the great problems of their time that they tend to be ignored by academic philosophers worldwide; both philosophers in other traditions, and academic philosophy in America, tend to prize knowledge rather than know-how. A deep and effective know-how is precisely what American thinkers and teachers--from Edwards to Martin Luther King--have expounded and embodied.

Jonathan Edwards was born in Connecticut in 1703. At age 11 he published in an English journal a four-page essay based on his observation, for 48 straight hours, of a spider building a web. At 14 he went to Yale College where he was thrilled by his reading of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), particularly Locke's exposition of the origin of ideas: The greatest lesson Locke had taught him was that the "true nature of things" could be part of his own experience, not through effort or strain, but through his own experience. He need not struggle; he would receive it through a wise passivity. Untutored as he yet was in philosophical thinking, he could grasp Locke's concept of objective reality coming to him in the form of ideas.12 As a pastor, Edwards applied Locke's empiricism to religious experience--his own and his parishioners. Edwards was convinced that religion is neither belief in a creed nor decent living, but "an inner individual experience."13 By his passionate and profoundly psychological sermons, he emerged as the leading theological and spiritual voice of "The Great Awakening" (1740-42).

In his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Edwards sought to establish criteria by which to discern which members of Christian congregations, including his own, had in fact experienced the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and thereby were entitled to the social as well as spiritual benefits of parish life. When he attempted to discern the spirit among his own parishioners according to his lights, those whom he judged not to be saved responded by judging pastor Edwards to be excessively conscientious in the exercise of his duties and thereupon sent him to perform missionary work among the Indians surrounding his parish in Northampton, Massachusetts.

From 1751 until he was appointed president of what is now Princeton University in 1757, Edwards ministered to the Indians and wrote a profound and influential treatise on freedom of the will. He argued that since the will is identical with the soul's prevailing inclinations, God rightly holds individuals responsible for the moral quality of their actions as expressions of their desires and intentions.

Edwards proved to be the last major American thinker who worked primarily out of a Calvinist framework: one generation later, the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were influenced by the European Enlightenment, particularly the political philosophies of Locke and Rousseau. The Founding Fathers, deeply learned and amazingly articulate, committed the new nation to a broad vision with ideals worthy to serve as the basis of a polity for the next two centuries and beyond.

The influential thinkers of the nineteenth century continued the process of replacing orthodox Christian institutions and dogmas by various non-sectarian spiritual perspectives. The remarkable emergence of imaginative thought in the middle decades of the nineteenth century--from Emerson's essays in the 1830's to the final edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass in the 1880's--proved as astonishing and as enduring as the group of political thinkers that guided the founding of the nation. As Jefferson towered over the group which articulated American polity, Emerson set the terms and the standard for the individuals who would articulate the American imagination. Most prominent in this literary movement, in addition to Emerson who was the most senior, were Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. All of these figures were large souls of extraordinary intellectual power and high artistry who were able to take in the broad, multi-leveled ideals and aspirations of the highly energetic New World culture.

In Emerson, who was born in 1803, we observe a figure who is schooled in history, literature and thought. By the time he was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1829 at age 26, the Calvinist theology of Jonathan Edwards had lost favor, but the emphasis on individual religious experience remained central to the evolving conception of religion and human nature. Emerson wrote two major declarations of cultural and epistemological independence: Nature (1836) and The American Scholar (1837). His definitive task was to convince his American listeners to overcome dependency on tradition, dogmas, religious institutions, and the thought of others. Emerson taught that it is better to think one's own thoughts poorly than borrow from the wisdom of sages. Prophet and critic of the new culture, he expressed most of the ideals which the others subsequently developed.

Although Emerson is identified with transcendentalism, an entirely correct and perhaps the surest entre to Emerson's thought is to focus on the relationship which he establishes between thinking and democracy. Emerson teaches that all individuals in this democratic culture can think their own thoughts, and can thereby participate in the American ideal of democracy. Emerson created a democratic epistemology, according to which a free-thinking person can create a new world, a world which is worthy of coming generations. In a way that anticipates James and Dewey, both of whom consciously built on him, Emerson understood that democracy and individual original thinking are really the same. "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"14 Emerson's writings answer that this is not only a possibility but, in a culture committed to the democratic ideal, it is a necessity. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?... There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.15 This is of course a declaration of American intellectual and religious freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom to trust one's own experience.

Emerson's great task, and insight, had to do with the relationship between personality and the transcendent self which is universal and infinite. Gertrude Reif Hughes offers this summary of Emerson's advice:

Such is the essence of Transcendentalism: the self which I am is comprised of my double membership in the world of personality and in the world of the Absolute and Infinite. We are at once the creator of our truth and meaning, and yet we are that because we are, in a prior and fundamental way, the absolute-infinity which circulates in each of us, and without which we could not think or be a person at all.

Admittedly, during the century and a half since Emerson developed his theory of individualism, American culture has not shown itself to be a faithful example of the Emersonian ideal. Yet, to the surprise of its observers, American thought and culture returns repeatedly to a transcendentalist ideal remarkably like Emerson's. In the present generation, in response to the poverty of behaviorist and empiricist images of the human being, transpersonalism represents an updated version of the archetypal American individualism.

Emerson is thoroughly transpersonalist in that he too talks about a kind of altered state, not one suddenly induced, but one which is nevertheless significantly different from our ordinary thinking. According to Emerson's epistemology, we think in harmony with and by means of a deep soul or spirit, a universal life. To the extent that I think a true thought, that thought comes out of my relationship to that universal and absolute life. It is a tiny step from Emerson's transcendentalist epistemology to William James' transpersonalist concept of "Something More" through which saving experiences come.

William James was born in 1842, in New York City, where he was visited by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend of his father, Henry James, Sr. James studied painting, biology (and went on a profoundly influential year-long trip to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz), and then he became, successively, a physician, a psychologist, and then a philosopher. He spent 30 years conducting parapsychological research. He traveled throughout New England with the nineteenth century equivalent of a videopac in search of "one white crow" who could safely be believed to be delivering messages from "the other side."17 James wrote on psychical research every year until his death in 1910; it was his single most consuming intellectual passion. Even during the current revival of interest in his thought, however, James' contribution to psychical research remains the part of his writings which has been almost universally ignored by philosophers and psychologists.

James remains the quintessential American personality and thinker: equally psychologist by virtue of his classic study Principles of Psychology (1890), religious thinker by virtue of his original and enduring classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and philosopher by virtue of his major works Pragmatism (1907), Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Essay in Radical Empiricism (1912). In all of these works, James shows himself the carrier of the American impetus toward the individual-in-relation: in his study of religious experience, for example, he focuses entirely on individual experience of the Beyond--the divine by whatever name. He explained the experience of the so-called sick-soul, conversion, saintliness and mysticism as examples of individualism in the sphere of religion. Temperamentally and philosophically a pluralist, James pronounced the religious experience of each individual to constitute additional evidence that human experience is resistant to a single summary.

John Dewey is continuous with this Emersonian-Jamesonian tradition; he argued that his fellow citizens would be more democratic and independent to the extent that they replaced religious belief by scientific intelligence. Dewey's position in this regard is well justified by the vitriolic attacks and distortions generated against him by educators and religious believers. Throughout his career Dewey was vilified, particularly with respect to his attempt to introduce more individualistic and experiential components in education.

That John Dewey's philosophy of social humanism, metaphysical naturalism, and pragmatic intelligence should have been the dominant intellectual influence in America throughout the second quarter of the present century is a clear indication that the transcendental in any form had been eclipsed. Without necessarily knowing it, it is partly against the scientific naturalism with which Dewey was identified that transpersonalism is building its alternative image of the human being, of knowledge, and of culture. Yet Dewey unquestionably had hold of one of the deepest passions in the American psyche--an individualism rooted in, deepened by, and in service to an ever enlarging community. Dewey's ideal of the community is built on individuals and is much closer to the ideal of individualism than to communalism or collectivism. In Dewey's ideal of the individual, the community serves a function similar to the universal and absolute in Emerson.

Dewey would have benefitted from the research of contemporary transpersonalism in that he would have recognized the democratic value of a psychology committed to each person's story wherever it leads. The 'wherever' is the critical part here because transpersonalist literature typically leads to dramatic transformations and disclosures. Since Dewey was a great champion of the variety of experience, and benefitted significantly from the physical therapy which he underwent with F. M. Alexander, he would undoubtedly have been sympathetic to transpersonalist empiricism--particularly with respect to research in somatics.

While it might appear that the line from Edwards to Dewey should be read as a steady loss of religious motivations and ideals, it is truer to say that the founding fathers and Dewey are at one end of the American religious spectruml, with Edwards and Martin Luther King at the other. America continues to use Biblical references as framework and substantial reference points. Admittedly, there is not agreement on the meanings of the texts quoted, and quotations are as often as not used from self-serving ends, but the line of Christian activists from the Puritans of the eighteenth century to the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights activists of the twentieth century all show the socio-political and mythico-psychological power of Biblical symbols and their essential role in America's self-definition. In his essay, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," Sacvan Bercovitch summarizes the ways in which the Bible continues to provide the symbolic and mythic language necessary for a united people. According to his account the ideals and phrases of the Puritans echo in the words of both Abraham Lincoln, the conscience of nineteenth century America, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the conscience of the second half of the twentieth century America:

In [their] obsessive verbal rituals the Puritans sought and found the answer to the problem of authority in a strange New World. Their solution was as simple as it was sweeping. They sanctified their society by the Bible's figures and types. That is, they vindicated the political and economic structures of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Incorporated, by the rule of scripture, as scripture brought to life. Consider John Winthrop's famous definition of the colony as a "city upon a hill." The direct reference is to the fifth chapter of Matthew, which speaks of the individual believer, the pilgrimage (by grace) of the redeemed soul. Winthrop retains this meaning, but he enlarges its application to include a grand prophetic design. His "city upon a hill" is also a community, a company in covenant, summoned by God to a historic mission. What he means in this sense is that the colony at large is a figura in sacred time. The wayfaring saint, at every stage in his journey, foreshadows the saint in glory he is to be. New England, as a city upon a hill, looks forward to the New Jerusalem that is to descend upon Mount Zion. In Winthrop's discourse, these two levels of meaning, personal and historical, are more than analogous or parallel They are reciprocal, intertwined--the verbal paradigm of a community of saints, "knit together by the bonds of love, as one man in Christ," and by "special commission" engaged upon an errand to the end of time.18

Garry Wills shows that Lincoln led the country into its time of testing with essentially the same vision. The "fathers" in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address are those who articulated the sacred American credo: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." In a speech in 1857 Lincoln explained to his audience that although they were not blood relations of the "fathers" who wrote the Declaration of Independence, they are nevertheless connected to them by the "moral sentiment" which binds all Americans and freedom-loving people:

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principles in them, that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.19

Lincoln's affirmation of individual rights and freedom is synonymous with his understanding of America--that it was begotten by the fathers of this moral principle. Wills explains: Lincoln talked of Americans in his day as morally begotten. But even the fathers brought forth their country from America's virgin land by the impregnation of an idea. By the speaking of the Declaration's word--as at the angel's annunciation to Mary--the country's parthenogenesis took place. This is the basic image of the Gettysburg Address: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."20

One hundred years after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr. explained that he could never adjust to segregation or discrimination, and complimented Lincoln on having been similarly "maladjusted" to slavery. He urged his audiences to be as maladjusted as Amos who, in the face of injustice, cried out: "Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." He urged his audience, and through them all Americans to be similarly maladjusted: As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.21

King is part of the tradition of American religious and social reformers--and American martyrs--committed to the realization of the American mission on behalf of individual freedom and social justice. The first two points in the citation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to King postumoulsy signal the identity of his life-work and the mission of America:

Martin Luther King, Jr., was the conscience of his generation. A southerner, a black man, he gazed on the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down. From the pain and exhaustion of his fight to free all people from the bondage of separation and injustice, he wrung his eloquent statement of his dream of what America could be.22

King, who described himself as a "drum major for righteousness," represents the fusion in the American conscience of providential justice, prophetic righteousness and social reform. All of his writings and lectures, as well as his courageous actions, issued from and served the American ideal of the individual as a moral force in service of the community. King was, of course, influenced by the tradition sketched thus far in this lecture--Puritans and Edwards, Emerson, Lincoln and James, as well as Gandhi--all of whom he studied at Boston University. The deepest source of his moral, and distinctively American conscience, however, was the African American church. The prophetic-messianic character of African American Christianity, combined with the wisdom and passion for justice born of the suffering of the African American people, may offer the truest version of the American ideal of freedom and justice as a goal for all humanity. For the first time in human history, nations with power to oppress are beginning to grasp what Gandhi, the civil rights movement and the feminist movement have been demonstrating--that acts of oppression and violence issue from fear and impotence and will ultimately fail. King believed, in the words of James Baldwin, that "black freedom will make white freedom possible."23

Significance of Transpersonalism for the Mission of America

The nineteenth century, particularly according to Emerson and other spokespersons of the American mind, focused on the interplay of the individual and the universal spirit, after a century-long battle between Christian redemption theology and the Enlightenment rationality of the Founding Fathers. At the end of the twentieth century, transpersonalism is a necessary antidote to the century-long excesses of a strident rationalism--including Dewey's more polemical writings--which combines the intellectual confidence of science with the practical powers inherent in social sciences and technology.

It would seem to be important for both the mission of America and the emerging transpersonalist worldview to establish their mutual affinities. At a minimum, it is worth showing that some of the tasks and battles to which the present generation of transpersonalists are committed closely resemble battles fought by Emerson and James on behalf of an individualist conception of experience. In that it represents a break with the prevalent presuppositions of humanism, transpersonal psychology would seem at least to have significant affinities with Edwards, Emerson and James. In its opposition to a shallow conception of the individual and the community, it also shares significant values with John Dewey. Reading the American psyche in the context of, or by means of, an evolution of consciousness, we might speculate that Dewey's critique of American culture, which consisted primarily in his contention that America was failing at democracy, particularly with respect to education, was entirely consistent with Emerson's critique of a false and shallow theory of human nature, one not built on an original relation to the universe.

Dewey's humanistic religion of democracy only appears to be opposite of Emersonian individualism: we should see transpersonal psychology as continuous with Dewey as well as with Emerson and James in their shared opposition to any view of the self which takes the given as normative or limited. Dewey did not affirm the unlimited to a degree found in the writings of Emerson, James and transpersonal psychologists, but this might be less important than his contribution as a critic of the passive and the static. The vision of individual righteousness and social justice espoused by the Puritans and Edwards, the founding fathers and Lincoln, and the civil rights movement of this century all confirm the depth and resilience of the American commitment to the ideal of individualism-in-relation to a saving community ideals and needs. These thinkers all evidence a sense of the evolution of these ideals, and their eventual realization by future generations.

Although Wilber, the primary exponent of the writings and ideas grouped under the label "transpersonal," often writes within an evolutionist perspective, it seems accurate nevertheless to characterize the philosophical presuppositions of transpersonal psychology as essentially perennialist. This tendency, if accurately attributed, would seem to follow from the influence of Asian spiritual philosophies and practices. It would be worth exploring the possible benefits of using a destructiviely American philosophical framework for future work in transpersonal philosophy and psychology.

In addition to its commonalities with classical American thinkers, Transpersonalism--or, more accurately transpersonal psychology and its implications for other disciplines--also represents a dramatic instance of new paradigm thinking. To a degree not possible even for Dewey's generation (those who wrote prior to mid-twentieth century), the transpersonalist literature is heir to the entire range of human culture. James' interpretive framework was prescient, but compared with contemporary documentation of states of consciousness, his data was culturally quite limited. Because it has access to the world-wide varieties of shamanism, mysticism, and other modes of altered states of consciousness, contemporary transpersonalism represents a collective statement which makes possible a paradigm for the future. If only because of its vast assembly of comparative cultural date, and the force of anthropology, comparative religion, and competing philosophies and psychologies, the new paradigm has been able to show the inadequacies of the paradigm which has dominated western thought since the seventeenth century.

Transpersonality perspectives should make possible a deeper understanding of cultural possibilities. American culture, for example, is rooted in violence and exploitation as well as in high ideals and a profound vision for the human future. Transpersonalist disciplines should show how America sustains a host of fundamentalist, colonialist, and other ideological "isms" which call forth base instincts, while at the same time it continues to advance its lofty founding vision, an unprecedented degree of individualism, religious tolerance and cultural pluralism.

In relation to these two interpretations of the modern West--essentially the masculine/feminine interpretations held in tension in Rick Tarnas' lecture and in his book Passion of the Western Mind--I am recommending that we regard transpersonalism as a middle way, or perhaps double way, with a distinctive American personality. Rick Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind uses European thinkers and texts, but the entire book exhibits a distinctively American philosophical and historical sensibility, and, I assume, could equally well have used Emerson, James and Dewey for the Romantic or participatory epistemology recommended in its widely discussed "Epilogue." My attempt to show transpersonalism continuous with the American tradition can be seen as an affirmation, with American materials, of Tarnas' attempt to sustain a positive and critical reading of the "western mind." The following text is central to Tarnas' Passion and completely descriptive of the transpersonal epistemology which I consider to be definitive of the psyche and spiritual mission of America:

The human spirit does not merely prescribe nature's phenomenal order; rather, the spirit of nature brings forth its own order through the human mind when that mind is employing its full complement of faculties--intellectual, volitional, emotional, sensory, imaginative. In such knowledge, the human mind "lives into" the creative activity of nature. Then the world speaks its meaning through human consciousness. Then human language itself can be recognized as rooted in a deeper reality, as reflecting the universe's unfolding meaning. Through the human intellect, in all its personal individuality, contingency, and struggle, the world's evolving thought-content achieves conscious articulation. Yes, knowledge of the world is structured by the mind's subjective contribution; but that contribution is teleologically called forth by the universe for its own self-revelation. Human thought does not and cannot mirror a ready-made objective truth in the world; rather, the world's truth achieves its existence when it comes to birth in the human mind. As the plant at a certain stage brings forth its blossom, so does the universe bring forth new stages of human knowledge. And, as Hegel emphasized, the evolution of human knowledge is the evolution of the world's self-revelation.24

My reading of the mission of America, or of the American Mind, can be seen as an echo, or example, of Rick Tarnas' conclusion that the increasingly prominent reading of the "western mind" as a male-dominated rush to power, alienation and ecological suicide is one of two interpretations which need to be held in tension. The Western mind and the American psyche are also properly understood as committed to an inner journey of free individuals whose unique vision and dedication represent the dynamic core, and agency, of the missions of both the Western mind and America. Tarnas' "Epilogue" and my reading of the Spiritual Mission of America are in agreement in tracing in these traditions--the American mind, after all, being a subset, albeit distinctive, of the western mind--a Romantic, or participatory epistemology and self-definition.25

In sum, I am recommending to this audience of more than five hundred professionals in varying degrees of sympathy with the Transpersonalist worldview that we view Transpersonalism as a recent expression of the Romantic impulse in the American psyche running from the Puritans of the seventeenth century through the development of the democratic ideal to the social and psychological movements of the late twentieth century. We should regard the Trans-personalist movement of the late twentieth century as continuous with, and an advance upon, the deep spiritual and essentially transpersonal thought of the classic exponents of the American vision, from Edwards to Dewey, and the moral intuition of social-political leaders such as Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

These thinkers surely espouse an understanding of the individual, the uniqueness of whom is an irreducible value rooted in and able to realize, by serving as an agent of the universe's self-revelation, a "trans" personal dimension. In the case of Jonathan Edwards this dimension is rooted in the saving experience of Jesus Christ. Emerson too talks about a kind of altered state which is significantly different from our ordinary thinking; he recommends we think by means of universal soul or spirit. According to James, it is an individual experience of "Something More" that brings about conversion from "sick soul" anguish to spiritual unity and health. Lincoln and King exemplify a consistent awareness of the significance for humanity of every moral deed, and the bond which sustains moral commitments to other peoples and other generations; both saw this consciousness as the special task, thus far unrealized, of America.

The whole evolution of consciousness suggests that America's great task has been to bring to the highest possible expression the ideal of the individual-in-relation: the individual as an expression of the economic, the political, the religious; the individual as an expression of freedom and creativity in service of humanity and the Earth. The spiritual mission of America has been to conceptualize, manifest and exemplify a new image of the human being as individual, as a unique agent of revelation and salvation. American hostility to ancient and traditional cultures--including particularly African and Indian--constitutes a threat to its deepest conviction and aspiration, namely, the creation of a society of uniquely different individuals. In itself, without the polarity of the community ideal, this absolute ideal of the individual is incomplete and unhealthy--and fortunately unrealizable. It exists in relation--to communities such as family, region, cultures and subcultures (e.g., religions, arts, sciences, ethnicities), as well as, obviously and necessarily to the Earth.

The future evolution of America is of course uncertain, but it does seem that if we have some sense of the American task, we can build on it. We can say to that culture: "Go back to your sources, and develop consistent with your karmic path a true individualism, not one steeped in materialism and fear of the other, nor one rooted in control and exploitation, but one rooted in all of the creative forces of individuals-in-relation to the source through which they and the whole of America live and move and have your being."

Footnotes

1 I was introduced to the study of classical American thought by my teachers at Queens College, CUNY, Eugene Fontinell, the late Ralph W. Sleeper and especially by my brother, John. J. McDermott. I delivered a version of this lecture at the Rudolf Steiner Institute (Waterville, ME) and dedicated it to the former co-director, the late Deborah Watts Hill, Ph.D.

2 The Annals of America. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1976. Volume I: 1493-1754), p. 115.

3 Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Land (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1984), p. xiii.

4 Quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 177. In the same place Bercovitch comments as follows: Only America, of all national designations, has assumed the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many other societies have defended the status quo by reference to religious values; many forms of nationalism have laid claim to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in secret or open heresy, to find the sacred in the profane, and many European defenders of middle-class democracy have tried to link order and progress. But only the American Way, of all modern ideologies, has managed to circumvent the paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal.

5 Quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," in Giles Gunn, ed., The Bible and American Arts and Letters (Phila., PA: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 224.

6 My conception of the evolution of consciousness is influenced by the writings of Rudolf Steiner (see my Essential Steiner, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1984) and Owen Barfield (see, among many other works, his Saving the Appearances, NY: Harcourt, Brace Jovanavitch, 1957).

7 Richard Tarnas. The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony Books, 1991).

8 See Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), and David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

9 See Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

10 See Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina, American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1971).

11 Springfield, 1858.

12 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, "Introduction," Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings (New York: New American Library, 1966), xi.

13 Ibid., xxii.

14 "Nature" in Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 21.

15 Ibid., p. 16.

16 Gertrude Reif Hughes, "Emerson's Epistemology with a Glance at Rudolf Steiner," Journal for Anthroposophy (1987), p. 39; see also Hughes, Emerson's Demanding Optimism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Univesity Press, 1984).

17 See Robert McDermott, "Introduction," William James, Essays in Psychical Research. The Writings of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xxii.

18 "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," p. 221.

19 Gary Wills, Under God--Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 212.

20 Ibid.

21 "The Power of Non-violence," in James M. Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1986), pp. 14-15.

22 Ibid., iv.

23 Ibid., p. xix; see James Baldwin, "Letter to the Bishop," New Statesman (23 August 1985), p. 9.

24 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), p. 435. .