Celebrating Eostre

What weird mixtures are formed in the cultural celebrations of our time! Fat, bearded old men combine with an image of a holy birth to give us Christmas; and with the passing of winter comes another and even stranger rite of bunnies, eggs, a crucifixion, and a rebirth, known as Easter.

The name is derived from that of an ancient Celtic goddess known as Eostre (who is still remembered in the name "Esther"). She was a symbol of fertility, of sexuality, union, potency, and growth. She was often pictured as a protectress of rabbits, as in this image, which is meant to represent Saint Melangell, a Christian development of the Eostre myth. Bunnies, as everyone knows, have long been a reminder of Nature's love of sex and fertility. The egg, symbol of conception and birth, enlarges on this celebration of sex and the continuance of Life through sex.

In Dan Brown's amazing novel, The DaVinci Code, Sophie, the brainy and beautiful codebreaker, goes back in memory to relive a scene of an Eostre rite, in which she sees her grandfather making love with a woman amid a circle of celebrants. This is a primordial Easter ritual: the honoring of Nature, fertility, and sexuality in a scene of loving community. It is an observance that has been repeated in one form or another in almost all cultures and traditions. In Chapter 2 of his Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, remarks on this communion of sexuality, love, and Cosmic Union in Nature:

The formed and the formless
Create and support each other.
In the Cosmic Unity,
The light and the dark dance and mingle
Like the breath of lovers.

So how did we get to the point where we now grimly remember a bloody, painful execution (itself glamorized in a well-known Mel Gibson film), followed by a story of resurrection? And where did Nature, her fertility and openness to the spirit of sexuality, the spirit of Eostre, go amid this new scene of sin, suffering, death, and escape to Heaven? It is one of the strangest developments in the ideological history of humankind, and we have yet a long way to go in unraveling its destructive and oppressive legacy.

How you celebrate Easter, then, will be largely a matter of the extent to which you have, or are willing to, cleanse yourself of that legacy of sin, guilt, misery, death, and separation from Nature. The veneration of Eostre was originally, it appears, about welcoming the first full moon of Spring and in the process, turning both within as individuals and toward one another as community, in a celebration of the regenerative capacity of Life to renew itself in the most natural, fulfilling, and delightful of physical acts. Therefore, why not disperse with the self-abasing darkness of a story about a naked man nailed to a tree and instead honor the spirit of Eostre by making Love--to your spouse, your lover, or even yourself?

What About Reincarnation?

I sort of used to be a Buddhist, and with them, reincarnation is a proven fact: there's lots of very well attested and documented records among them of people who visit the environment of a previous lifetime and demonstrate a familiarity well beyond the realm of ordinary possibility. I'm sure you heard or read much of this material (a good source in this respect is Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, one of the best-written guides to death and its experiential aura ever produced--I have a copy and in fact quoted him in the last chapter of the HP book).

That stuff is pretty compelling, but I found that reincarnation reduced to the level of belief became for me a kind of catechism, a doctrine to be followed rather than experienced. By the time I became a Buddhist I had already encountered Roger Woolger's work: he's a Jungian psychotherapist who wrote a book called Other Lives, Other Selves that documents his clinical work in leading people into their past lives. I met him at the NY Open Center about 18 years ago, and watched him as he gave the most compelling demonstration of past-life regression that I have ever witnessed (more than one, actually). I wanted to try it myself, but didn't have the money to afford his fees and never quite got around to really attempting it on myself. Woolger said that he had no opinion about reincarnation, because he saw this form of regression as a clinical instrument, a method that helped people feel better.

Working with the I Ching, I've come to a less structured and more embracing way of understanding the life of consciousness that continues after the death of a living being in form (this goes, of course, for humans and all other life-forms). My meditation experience with Lao Tzu, which I wrote about in one of the chapters of the new book, tended to confirm a general impression that consciousness continues after death (to this day, I quite commonly feel my old, beloved cat Lou jumping onto the bed beside me, and hear his purring--sometimes I'll look or feel about in the dark for him, the sensation is so clear).

But it's not about a progression of lives, birth to death to birth to death to birth, ad infinitum or until you gain enough karmic merit to enter Nirvana--that seems to me an ideological simplification of a truly quantum and time-defying process. I think we can, for example, experience the consciousness of people or beings who haven't lived yet in linear time, or of the consciousness of entire nations, peoples, species, or planets. We both already know from experience that we can directly feel the presence, hear the voice, and sense the feelings of those who are alive but physically distant from us: this, too, tells us of the extraordinary motility and energy of consciousness--it leaps through time and space and across the boundaries of self and other. That's why the so-called string theory of modern physics appeals to me: not, though, because I'd like to imagine the Cosmos as consisting of physical threads of infinite matter. I'm far more attracted to the idea of the vibration of the strings, the music that they produce: that, to me, is the reality of string theory; because that helps to explain my experience. I feel as if every time I consult the I Ching, for example, in a mindful attitude of sincerity and openness, one (or more) of those strings is "plucked" and I hear the resonant music of the Cosmic Teacher.

Two Questions for a Time with No Answers

Yes, we are all struggling with it--even to choose to avoid or overlook it is just another way of wrestling with this numbing reality. The size and vastness of this human loss have seemed to dwarf everything else that so deeply appalled us a few days ago (such as Iraq). Like the water that snuffed the lives of a hundred thousand people in a few torrential moments of unimaginable force, it overwhelms the intellect and all the other familiar devices of inner order and moral tabulation that we rely on to explain the omens and events that are fed to us in each day's news.


Yet we have to try, and it has already started. A New York Times editorial spoke of "the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth's surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them." A popular astrologer, Jonathan Cainer, wrote: "After the earthquake, it is hard not to wonder whether, through our callous disregard for the environment, we humans are now starting to make an enemy of the earth itself?" Andrew Limburg of Independent Media TV reports an alarming temporal coincidence between seismic testing for oil and gas and recent sea-born earthquakes, including the one at the center of this catastrophe, and he asks if this is all a "Coincidence or a Corporate Oil Tragedy?" Others are asking how a one to two hour long window of time between the earthquake and the arrival of the tsunamis at the affected countries could have been ignored in evacuating endangered shoreline areas. Keith Olbermann's popular blog at MSNBC.com has reported that several warnings from seismologists and scientists in the area appear to have been ignored by government officials in Thailand who may have been more interested in protecting the income from tourism than in ordering precautionary evacuations.


These explanations and questions will all need to be addressed, and soon. Yet something tells me that this is not the time for it. What is required now is, first and foremost, a global outreach of feeling, care, and help to all in that part of the world who have suffered, and will continue to suffer. This may mean a donation to organizations that are involved in the delivery of needed services and other human help (a listing may be found here ); and a call to corporations, governments, and other institutions to bury their agendas, put down the calculator, and help (another astrologer, Eric Francis , asks "whether the message is getting across that we in the Western world have much more important things to do with our resources than bomb people.").


More than this is the provision of help that comes from the Cosmic energies that connect and imbue us all. This is a gift that anyone of any economic status can give, from a few moments of sincerity and open awareness each day. For many, of course, it may appear difficult to pray for those afflicted: after all, an indifferent Cosmos (to the editorial writer of the Times); an angry Earth (to Jonathan Cainer); or simply a wrathful God (to many religious people who also believe that their God hates Americans, or Islamic fundamentalists, or whoever the enemy of their in-group happens to be) is what brought us this disaster and its unfathomable loss of innocent life (it is estimated that at least a third of the dead were children). So propitiatory prayer may not be the best inner approach in this moment: perhaps a less doctrinal or denominational invocation is what is needed now. I have found that my most effective conversations with the invisible realm happened where I had no idea who or what I was calling out to, and no expectation of how the help would come. But it did.


So we can begin by thinking of the dead, and asking that the consciousness of each individual who lost his and her bodily life in this cataclysm be touched with luminosity and the acceptance of letting go, to arrive at a center of peace in the realm of the Formless. Then, perhaps we can ask that each of the dead be given the ability to connect with the heart of his and her family and loved ones, so that they will deeply feel the continuing presence of the Beloved, even amid their grief. We can similarly ask that help, in all its manifest and hidden forms, arrive for those left behind, and that their suffering be eased and their lives blessed with insight and the energy to go on. It seems like an impossible request to make in the face of such a soul-crushing vastness of suffering--homelessness, poverty, waste, illness, and seemingly unendurable loss. Let us humbly acknowledge that seeming impossibility in our conversation with the hidden world; for that will help us to cast our call for help across the earth, without the impediment of expectation or self-consciousness. And let us follow our call for help with an expression of gratitude, for this will further activate the helping consciousness that is being engaged by our inner work and aid in returning us all to a more open awareness of the true human place within the ocean of the universe.


The next step, which really is an inseparable part of the the whole in this inner response, is for each of us to ask the question, "what can I learn from this event, in order to live my life out in a more harmonious connection with the Cosmic Source of my being, the Destiny to which I will return, as these tens of thousands have done so suddenly?" This is less about asking the questions posed by the editorialists mentioned above (though similar questions may occur to each of us), and more about returning to the most deeply personal questions that may occur to us intermittently over the course of a human life. The marvelous meditation teacher and writer, Jon Kabat-Zinn , discusses these kinds of questions in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are (New York, Hyperion: 1994):


"The truly interesting question here is, 'What exactly is my way?', meaning my 'Way' with a capital W. Rarely do we contemplate our life with this degree of probing. How frequently do we linger in such basic questions as 'Who am I?', 'Where am I going?', 'What path am I on?', 'Is this the right direction for me?', 'If I could choose a path now, in which direction would I head?', 'What is my yearning, my path?', 'What do I truly love?'" (p. 132).


Every person's true self is always ready, always eager, in fact, to address these questions; and if a terrible event like the Asian earthquake can help many of us to raise such questions in a spirit of sincerity and humility, then the healing benefit will be transmitted across the field of consciousness to those who have suffered. There is no doctrinally-approved or universal method or technique to addressing such questions: every individual's discovery will be unique. That said, it does appear to be true that some form of meditation represents a very practical means of reaping the greatest benefit--both for oneself and for the whole of humanity and our planet--in exploring the depths to which such questions may lead us. But meditation, too, will be found to be unique for each individual who practices it: one person may find that it consists in a run around the park or a walk through a silent wood; another may find meditation in the quiet interval before sleep descends; others may find the contemplative potential contained in a practice such as Tai Chi Chuan or in a simple, everyday activity, mindfully done--such as cooking a meal, taking a bath, or tending a garden. Such experiences will often open us to other meditative moments that life offers--from moments of restful awareness during a daily commute to work, all the way to the various forms of sitting meditation practiced in formal traditions such as Zen Buddhism. How you "get there"--that is, how you open yourself past the boundaries of the superficial, in a broadening expansion of awareness--is, again, an individual matter: the journey itself means far more than the means employed or the route taken. Just follow the questions that arise from within, and let them teach you; let them lead you.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________


So, with that understanding, and in the confidence that everyone will undertake to learn uniquely the lessons that these events contain (and thereby contribute to the growth of us all, for every path of self-discovery followed in sincerity and humility furthers the paths of all); I will try to sketch out a few of the principal points that I have learned in the past few days of exploring the personal meaning of this moment of darkness upon the Earth.


"The world is too much with us" the poet Wordsworth warned us, and this is part of what I hear in the lesson of these events. This is somewhat in the vein of Cainer's ominous fear, quoted above, that humankind has made an enemy of the Earth; but as true in its way as that may be, I would prefer to take the matter of enmity out of consideration, because I do not believe the Earth or the Cosmos knows or recognizes anything of human enmity, so why speak of it now? I would prefer to emphasize the inner direction of Wordsworth's warning--that a pervasive obsession with the superficial ("getting and spending," as he puts it) has brought us to a point of division and separation from the Earth and our deep connection to it as a living organism--indeed, as the "macro-organism" of which we are "micro" cells and supporting components.


This separation has been created through a multiplicity of influences and motivations: the impulse of enmity and the war-compulsion that Francis justly complains of; the arrogant intrusiveness of our oil-lust and our use of increasingly invasive means of punishing our planet--sucking its life-force with the tools of our accumulation-obsession, as Andrew Limburg suggests; and the mindless complacency of our attitude toward our celestial home--the depth of our conceit and the global breadth of our ignorance.


At this very moment, another space-probe is speeding among the moons of Saturn, taking measurements and collecting data; the American Congress has passed legislation to allow for the exploitation of outer space by tourists and private corporations or individuals who wish to pursue their private agendas beyond the gravitational field of the Earth; and NASA has announced a possible restoration of the space shuttle program in 2005. Our obsession with "the heavens" and "the beyond" seems to know no bounds of scientific curiosity or entrepreneurial adventure (and corporate or government funding)--yet how little, how infinitesimally meagre, is our knowledge of our own planet, our home!


In this respect, we can allow the numbers to help tell the tale: the major government-funded player in the Earth science field in America is the U.S. Geological Survey, which has been budgeted slightly over $900 million for FY 2005; while NASA, the agency responsible for the exploration of outer space, will receive over $16 billion. But the obvious disparity in these comparative budgetary figures, enormous as it is, is less important than the ideological prejudice that it reflects. What if a similar technical, creative, and financial energy were expended on a thorough and sensitive understanding of the composition and dynamics of our planet as on the disposition of the Moon, the farthest reaches of our galaxy, and the depths of the universe beyond? Nor is the United States alone in this obsession with space: Russia and China have displayed the same outward-staring myopia, in spite of their obvious human and resource-management crises that they continually face within their own countries.


But let us return to the inner lesson here: there is some distortion of consciousness, a massive misdirection of focus and belief, that is supporting such an enormity of ignorance and arrogance--to stop asking questions once the numbers are announced would be to repeat the already recurrent error of the mass media in this regard. My own feeling is that it all relates directly to the tacit but palpable megalomania that informs our culture's self-image and its systemic, medieval model of the human place in the Cosmos. "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof": an external God (to Whom the most powerful leader in the world currently is connected, by his own admission) has appointed a chosen species made in His image (by the way, God is a Man) to conquer and control our planet and our universe, and force them into a position of submission and subservience to this Man-God that has been assigned to rule the Earth.


The corollary of this assignation of dominance from the Deity further clarifies the height of the delusion (and Wordsworth's timely warning as to its extent): "be fruitful and multiply." This is a commandment from the Ruler of the Universe to humankind that basically amounts to an endorsement of total occupation: populate every corner of the Earth, and then over-populate it--not just with your human presence in its teeming multitudes, but in the sheer weight of your creations of dominance. Let the concrete and steel towers of Man be seen from everywhere on the globe (and even from outer space); let the paved roads, the machines, the vessels of transportation and commerce, and the tools of exploitation and destruction spread over the Earth and into its galaxy, until the delusion of human Deity, human Mastery, is made the overpowering and unremitting Reality of the universe.


"There is nothing that the human mind cannot accomplish" is the technological axiom supporting this net of institutionalized arrogance. Perhaps so; but there is also nothing, it seems, that the human mind cannot destroy. The cost of this web of distortion is the very thing with which we began our life as a species, and which we can never quite renounce, no matter how far we monumentalize our supremacy and disparage or enslave our planetary neighbors--the plants, animals, and inorganic (but sentient) consciousness of our Earth.


This cost is being revealed graphically to us in the reports coming from the scene of the devastation in Asia. News sources (such as CNN ) are reporting that rescuers (actually, those who are reviewing the carnage and counting the dead) are not finding any dead animals among the terrible human waste that they are discovering on the beaches and nearby inland areas of at least six countries. Where have the elephants, monkeys, and other indigenous creatures of these parts gone, and what made them go? Currently, all we're hearing is that the animals appear to have fled to high ground before the tsunamis struck land. But what told them that they were coming--what did they know, and how, that all the people appear to have missed?


In hearing these reports, I was reminded of research, published recently, that revealed the ability of dogs to detect epileptiform activity in a person well before the obvious symptomatic onset of epilepsy (the convulsions characteristic of epileptic seizures). Animals, it seems, are possessed of what humans call a "sixth sense" in regard to such things. Most pet-owners will tell you that their dog or cat will come running into the house minutes before a storm arrives; and it has been reported for centuries that animals can detect and respond appropriately to the immanence of a tornado, earthquake, or other natural environmental disruption, well before it becomes manifest to conventional human senses.


But aren't we animals, too? What happened to our "sixth sense"? Why can't we respond to trouble before it arrives, just like the apes and other creatures from whom we descend? The fact is, we do, and we can. Our problem is that most of us in Western cultures (and Western-influenced cultures like those in India, Thailand, and other Asian countries) have been deeply conditioned to deny, repress, and demonize our animal nature--even to the point of rationalizing our animal abilities away in an odd act of false modesty that credits the animals with exclusive powers that we do not possess (and, in a quick reversal, we proceed to marshal--that is, enslave--the animals, in order to serve our self-interest, instead of asking whether and how we might recover or develop similar skills in ourselves). Most of us in this culture have been trained to believe that our animal nature is a part of our "lower nature," our "baser self," to which is ascribed all our evil, taboo, primitive, and ungodlike impulses, such as deviousness, violence ("bestiality"), and sexuality. From our earliest childhood, most of us are subjected to this form of conditioning, until it becomes so deeply and insidiously programmed into us that it seems a part of our very nature! As we grow up, we learn to make compromises with our animal nature--to tame it, train it, and channel it into socially-acceptable forms of expression and indulgence. This is the compromise that is memorialized in all the dominant religious ideologies of the West, in many of our codes of governmental law, and in much of our science, such as the Freudian canon of psychology.


It doesn't have to be this way: all we have to do to free ourselves of this madness and to begin the recovery of our whole being in all its diversity of skills, senses, and adaptive abilities is to expose, challenge, and then discard the ideological assumptions and lies upon which this self-limiting folly is founded. This is not a process that will demand monumental or Herculean effort: we simply need to turn inward and face down the demons in an attitude of unwavering, cut-the-crap perseverance. Nor will it require special training, skills, or professional expertise; for this is a task that calls on each individual's common sense and our natural ability to communicate--that is, to share private insight within a social setting. After all, it was probably such a combined influence of individual sensation and shared communication that helped the animals escape the waves of death that trapped so many humans.


Perhaps there is an evolutionary lesson in this as well: we are perhaps being called back to a living relationship of equivalence with Nature and her creatures. Evolution is not the linear, survival-of-the-fittest, exclusionary movement from primitive-to-civilized that has often been drilled into us. No: evolution is probably more accurately conceived in that more transformative of geometric shapes, the circle. It winds through overlapping arcs and ripples of Change, none of which can be identified as definitive or superior.


Could it be, I have been wondering, that we humans are on one such arc of transformation, wherein the limitations of intellect-in-isolation are coming to be generally realized--a period of return to a broader perspective on ourselves and our planetary neighbors? For several millennia, we have pushed our forebrains, naked, out onto the stage of life, in an ever-increasing isolation of aggrandizement and distortion, only to discover--on a deeply visceral, maybe even a genetic basis--that we can't truly survive or endure this way. Are we in the midst of an evolutionary ripple that is taking us, through the developmental shocks of crisis and tragedy, into a more intimate and equivalent relationship with Nature--with the animals and plants, rocks and soil of our world--that will lead us back from the delusion of the monarchy of intellect, toward the complete and regenerative experience of ourselves as individual threads in the eternal fabric of Being?


I do not know the answer.

The Lesson of Loss

This past Wednesday, many of us learned that tears of rage burn the most. I was among these: I cried, fumed, spat, and despaired--even as I was preparing myself for another day's commute, another day at the office.

Across this nation, there were some 50 million of us in that predicament, and who knows how many more around the world.

As I walked into the building where I work, the need for restraint became clear: some would understand a passing case of the blues, but overt emotionalism would be suspect amid the corporate realm. So I took a deep breath and tightened my inner belt, my soul groaning beneath the tension.

What I found when I came into the office was astonishing: it was like strolling through a funeral parlor at one of its peak periods. But there were no professional mourners here: the anguish was real; there were no crocodile tears amidst this lot. A young man who sits two cubicles off was darkly staring into his blank computer screen, clearly lost in a painful inner struggle. My manager, a forceful Hispanic woman, slowly shook her head, her face streaked with tears. No work was being done. Even the fellows from India--here on temporary "onshore" assignment--were visibly downcast or even distraught. It occurred to me that these guys had the least stake of all in the fate of John Kerry's campaign--indeed, they would seem to benefit more from a Bush victory and the assurance of continued outsourcing of American jobs. Yet they were not thinking about economic issues or any superficial self-interest--they were only aware in that moment of an enormous error, a distortion of judgment on the part of a nation and its government.

At that moment, it began to become clear to me that this is where transformation begins--that indeed, this is what "valueshock" is all about. This victorious administration has lived according to the principle of "shock and awe." What they failed to account for is that shock and awe are usually followed inexorably--after a moment of confusion and despair--by fear, which quickly breeds rage. A cornered cat has the sharpest claws; and there is no better way of assuring noise and even violence among a people than to enforce silence and subjection upon them. This is the lesson of Iraq, which Bush and his entourage continue to ignore at their own peril.

So I began to practice what I teach others to do: I began to ask questions--specifically, about what this loss, this seemingly overwhelming defeat, had to teach me. Here is what I learned.

I discovered, first and perhaps foremost, that dependence upon a group or party, however hopeful its message or promising its potential, cannot lead us out of difficulty. I want to be very clear about what I mean here: this is no diminishment or criticism of John Kerry or his cause. I feel just as strongly now as I did on Tuesday that Kerry would make a fine leader, and perhaps a great president. But maybe there was too much pressure of belief and expectation placed on him--more, indeed, than any man could shoulder. This has nothing to do with Kerry's mettle, but rather with our own error in looking to a party-based or group-oriented solution to problems that we must first address within ourselves, as individuals.

This, of course, runs directly counter to the judgment of the pundits and Wednesday-morning quarterbacks in the press, who declared that the Democratic party was not organized enough, that it did not have that same rigidly-defined self-image that the Republican party has fostered.

I was reminded of Will Rogers' statement, "I am not a member of an organized party--I am a Democrat." For Rogers, this was a point of honor: to be a Democrat, for him, was to be an individual. I think that, in order to survive the next four years, we must follow the import of Rogers' words. We are now under the yoke of a tight-fisted, lockstep cult that violently enforces obedience, that equates dissent with treason, that knows only two shades of human value--"with us" or "against us". This is not a time for a more rigid organization, but for loose and spontaneous social structures; it is not a time for enforced order, but for playfulness, diversity, and a good measure of mayhem. What brought the Democrats to the verge of victory (and according to some, an actual, but stolen victory) was a grassroots-style exuberance and rabble-rousing, marked by persistent acts of ironic questioning and the often hilarious skewering of those stone-grey old white men in Washington. Now, and for the next few years, we simply need to turn it all up a notch or two.

The next lesson I learned as I asked myself about what this defeat had to teach us has to do with fear and cynicism. We're headed into some very dark water, amid which we will meet many challenges and tragedies. But if we approach this darkness in fear and cynicism, we will have simply concretized the attitudes that brought us to this point in the first place. The Neocons sold America a bill of goods that consisted solely of fear: fear of terror, fear of death, fear of being turned into a smoking pool of goo during your next commute to work. Much of the American public, it seems, bought these goods and cast a vote of cynicism, captured in the phrase, "better the devil you know..." This is why I say that so far, the real winner in this election has been none other than Osama. The more we give in to fear and cynicism, and the more of us that do it, the more will OBL's victory become manifest. He, and everything he stands for, took Ohio and Florida--not Bush. Note that the states that still bear the physical and emotional scars of 9/11--NY, NJ, PA, DC--all came down on Kerry's side. So this will be a time of a return to that individualism which gave this nation its first and most vital energy, long before there was a Florida or a Mason-Dixon line (see my earlier piece, "The Declaration of Independents"). We cannot change a government of empire through the formation of an opposing cult or other group ideology--that would be like trying to put out a fire with a bottle of whisky. Our only hope lies in a determined focus on true freedom--not the freedom to make a profit on the death of children or the Donald Rumsfeld idea of freedom (which is more like anarchy)--but the freedom that arises uniquely in each individual who chases out the demons of fear, hatred, and complacency and allows what lies beneath the crust of cultural falsehood to express itself.

The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilbur reminds us that "it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness." In a situation like the one we're facing now, the question that each of us may need to ask ourselves is, "what is my candle, and where do I point its light?" It will be different--unique--for every one of us; but the light will be the same, and if enough of us continue to cast our light on the demons that have stolen our nation from us, there will, inevitably, be transformation.

So this morning, I ask that we rediscover the Democratic party of which Will Rogers was so justly fond; that each one of us who feels the injustice of what has occurred in this election be inspired to look within, find the candle, and strike a match.

At the End, Remembering How it All Started

Tomorrow morning, November 2, 2004, I'll join many other Americans in getting up as early as possible and heading to the local polling place with a small book and a large coffee. I'll wait in line and see if there's anyone who feels like talking; then I'll wait my turn to make a tiny contribution toward increasing the unemployment rate in Crawford and bringing some early breath of reason and balance to the world order.

Tonight, I am remembering how all this began: how what may have been seen as a dream only a few months ago--that a marginal political figure from Massachusetts could be on the brink of the greatest upset in political history--came to this threshold of realization. It is a reminder of the true substance of a democracy, and the potential that lies, largely untapped still, for the emergence of a truly natural social order.

It began a number of years ago, with an obscure, grassroots organization called Moveon.org, which was formed as an effort to draw America out of the moralistic morass in which it had been trapped after the Monica Lewinsky revelations and the bizarre impeachment hearings against President Clinton. Quietly, this organization attracted interest and followers for its balanced call toward a renewed focus upon the things that matter in political life: advancing the cause of social (and especially racial) equality, making government truly responsive to the needs of the citizens to whom it purportedly belongs, pursuing goals of peace and stability in our nation's international affairs, and building a broad and inclusive foundation of economic prosperity to leave the next generation after us. Moveon, of course, pioneered the use of email and the Internet to advocate for its causes and objectives, and its success spawned a movement that has taken us to this transformative moment in American political history.

Howard Dean appeared, nearly two years ago, to adapt Moveon's methods, approaches, and experience in creating popular and financial backing for his own candidacy. The grassroots movement that his town-hall and online meetings gave rise to, along with his ability to see the vast potential of the Internet in that vein, brought him to the brink of winning the Democratic party's nomination. To all the Dean supporters out there, I offer the following reminder: Howard Dean did not fail. In fact, he succeeded in a way and a degree that few before him have ever succeeded: he completely re-energized the way a political campaign is practiced, and in the process left the smug, hidebound neocons in his progressive dust. History will not care that Dean lost a few primaries or had a meltdown during a press conference in Iowa--it will only note that he transformed the way political candidates connect with voters, and that he attracted millions of once-apathetic citizens into an active sense of involvement and responsibility in the democratic political process.

John Kerry and the Democratic leadership were quick to perceive the value of what organizations like Moveon and candidates like Dean had accomplished; and they were equally quick to build upon that momentum. Kerry's candidacy (especially if it is victorious tomorrow) will be remembered as the first digital Presidential campaign in history. While the Bush propaganda machine focused on inflammatory TV ads, and only relied on cyberspace to give voice to fringe slander groups which spread the kind of lies that wouldn't even make it past the National Enquirer's editorial desk, the Democrats adapted the vision and experience of online groups like Moveon, ACT, and Howard Dean's meetup networks to diffuse a positive, forthright image of themselves and their candidates. This was not the work of a political machine or a closed oligarchy of wonks or advertising executives: this was the creation of an interactive community led by creative people of every stripe and orientation--from Hollywood (led, of course, by Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11, which is appearing on the DISH satellite network online at this very moment) to the arena of popular entertainment (Eminem pre-released his "Mosh" music video online a week before the election) to the world of high finance (while Moore campaigned with college-age "slackers", George Soros spent a month speaking to press clubs and business leaders). But throughout all of this, and informing the spirit and energy of these more famous and well-heeled supporters, were the Moveon bake sales, the telephone parties, and the grassroots gatherings of students, mothers, minorities, and all the anonymous activists whose energy turned a double-digit defeat into a dead heat. All of these people, the luminaries and the anonymous among them, communicated and shared their sense of a transformative opportunity in this nation through the primary medium of the Internet.

John Kerry has shown enough character, principle, intellect, feeling, and pure energy during this campaign to convince me that he is much more than a mere alternative to Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft: John Kerry represents an opportunity for this nation to begin to right itself in the eyes of the world. He has shown me that he has the potential to be a very good president--perhaps even a great one. As long as he remembers that his success arose from the fact that tens of millions of creative and caring people came together for him in a synergistic groundswell, at a time when he'd been declared soundly beaten by many of the TV pundits and pollsters, he will do well by us. And we will be able to look back gratefully upon the first true President of the 21st century, who was given his mandate to lead by the voice of the people, spoken through the synchronistic energy of the World Wide Web.

So thank you, John Kerry, for listening and for following that voice. Good luck, and may the teaching and helping energies of the Universe be always active within you.