CHAPTER 5: The American Matrix for Transformation We have it in our power to begin the world, again.
— THOMAS PAINE, Common Sense (1776)
Tho' obscured, 'tis the form of the angelic land.
— WILLIAM BLAKE, America (1817)
Linked by television, millions of Americans had a collective peak experience on July 4, 1976, as they watched an armada of serene and beautiful sailing ships glide through New York harbor. Many were stirred by an unaccountable sense of hope and harmony, infused for a few hours with the nation's early vision and promise, remnants of the dream of unity, opportunity, and what Jefferson once called "the holy cause of freedom."
During that summer the European press noted the importance of the "American experiment," as the London Sunday Telegraph called it. Had it not been successful, "the idea of individual freedom would never have survived the Twentieth Century." Neu Zurcher Zeitung in Zurich said, "The American Bicentennial celebrates the greatest success story in modern history. The 1776 beacon, rekindled and invigorated in various ways — not least by puritan self-criticism — has endured." Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter observed that Americans are not bound together by social and cultural ties, family, or even language, so much as by the American dream itself.
But then we must ask, whose American dream? The dream is a chameleon; it has changed again and again. For the first immigrants, America was a continent to explore and exploit, a haven for the unwanted and the dissenters — a new beginning. Gradually the dream became an ascetic and idealized image of democracy, bespeaking the age-old hope for justice and self-governance. All too quickly, that dream metamorphosed into an expansionist, materialist, nationalist, and even imperialist vision of wealth and domination — paternalism, Manifest Destiny. Yet even then, there was a competing Transcendentalist vision: excellence, spiritual riches, the unfolding of the latent gifts of the individual.
There have been populist dreams in which a benevolent American government achieves lasting parity among people by redistributing wealth and opportunity. There are dreams of rugged individualism — and ideals of brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.
Like that of the founding fathers and of the American Transcendentalists of the mid- 1800s, the dream of the Aquarian Conspiracy in America is a framework for nonmaterialist expansion: autonomy, awakening, creativity — and reconciliation.
As we shall see, there have always been two "bodies" of the American dream. One, the dream of tangibles, focuses on material well-being and practical, everyday freedoms. The other, like an etheric body extending from the material dream, seeks psychological liberation — a goal at once more essential and more elusive. The proponents of the latter dream have nearly always come from the comfortable social classes. Having achieved the first measure of freedom, they hunger for the second.
THE ORIGINAL DREAM We have forgotten how radical that original dream was — how bold the founders of the democracy really were. They knew that they were framing a form of government that challenged all the aristocratic assumptions and top-heavy power structures of Western history.
The Revolutionaries exploited every available means of communication. They linked their networks by energetic letter writing. Jefferson designed an instrument with five yoked pens for writing multiple copies of his letters. The new ideas were spread through pamphlets, weekly newspapers, broadsides, almanacs, and sermons. As historian James MacGregor Bums noted, they also formulated their protests as official appeals to the king "shipped across the Atlantic after suitable hometown publicity."
Hardly anyone expected the American uprising to succeed. Thousands of colonists emigrated to Canada or hid in the woods, certain that the king's armies would tear the colonial regiments to shreds. Nor did a majority of the people support the struggle for independence /even in theory. Historians estimate that one-third favored independence, one-third favored retaining British ties, and one-third were indifferent.
"The American War is over," Benjamin Rush wrote in 1787, "but this is far from the case of the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is over." Not only was the Revolution ongoing, as Rush said; it had preceded the military confrontation. "The war was no part of the revolution," John Adams reflected in 1815, "but only an effect and consequence of it." The revolution was in the minds of the people. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. Long before the first shot is fired, the revolution begins. Long after truce is declared, it continues to overturn lives.
Although it is rarely noted in histories of the American Revolution, many of the arch-Revolutionaries came from a tradition of mystical fraternity. Except for such traces as the symbols on the reverse side of the Great Seal and the dollar bill, little evidence remains of this esoteric influence (Rosicrucian, Masonic, and Hermetic). [1] That sense of fraternity and spiritual enfranchisement played an important role in the intensity of the Revolutionaries and their commitment to the realization of a democracy.
"A New Order of the Ages Begins," says the reverse side of the Great Seal, and the Revolutionaries meant it. The American experiment was consciously conceived as a momentous step in the evolution of the species. "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind," Thomas Paine said in his inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense.
THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS — EXTENDING THE DREAM In the early and middle nineteenth century, the American Transcendentalists restated and reinvigorated that second dream. As we will see in Chapter 7, they rejected traditional authority in favor of inner authority. Their term for autonomy was "self-reliance." Transcendentalism seemed to them a logical extension of the American Revolution — spiritual liberation as a counterpart to the freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
The autonomy of the individual was more important to them than allegiance to any government. If conscience did not concur with the law, Thoreau said, civil disobedience was called for.
The Transcendentalists supposedly threatened the older order with their "new ideas"; but the ideas were not new, only the prospect of applying them in a society. The eclectic Transcendentalists had drawn not only from Quaker and Puritan traditions but also from German and Greek philosophers and Eastern religions. Although they were charged with having contempt for history, they replied that humankind could be liberated from history.
They challenged the assumptions of the day in every realm: religion, philosophy, science, economy, the arts, education, and politics. They anticipated many of the movements of the twentieth century. Like the human-potential movement of the 1960s, the Transcendentalists maintained that most people had not begun to tap their own inherent powers, had not discovered their uniqueness or their mother lode of creativity. "But do your thing," Emerson said, "and I shall know you."
Among themselves they tolerated dissent and diversity, for they were sure that unanimity was neither possible nor desirable. They knew that each of us sees the world through our own eyes, our own perspective. Long before Einstein, they believed all observations to be relative. They sought companions, not disciples. Emerson's charge: Be an opener of doors to those who come after.
They believed that mind and matter are continuous. In contrast to the mechanistic Newtonian ideas prevalent in their day, they saw the universe as organic, open, evolutionary. Form and meaning can be discovered in the universal flux, they believed, if one appealed to intuition — "Transcendental Reason." More than a century before neuroscience confirmed that the brain has a holistic mode of processing, the Transcendentalists described flashes, intuitions, and a kind of simultaneous knowing. Generations before Freud, they acknowledged the existence of the unconscious. "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence," Emerson said.
But they did not reject intellectual knowledge; they believed reason and intuition to be complementary, mutually enriching. Functioning with both faculties one could be awake and live in "the enveloping now." (Emerson once said, "Every day is Doomsday.")
Inner reform must precede social reform, the Transcendentalists maintained; yet they found themselves campaigning on behalf of suffrage and pacifism and opposing slavery. And they were social innovators, establishing a cooperative community and an artists' collective.
To support themselves and bring their ideas to a larger public, they helped launch the Lyceum movement, traveling around the country in an early version of the lecture circuit, trying out their ideas in a variety of settings. Their journal, The Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson (aided by Thoreau), had an impact far beyond its small circulation of one thousand, just as the Transcendentalists themselves had influence out of all proportion to their number.
Before the Civil War intervened. Transcendentalism had almost reached the proportions of a national grass-roots movement. Apparently many Americans of the day were attracted to a philosophy that stressed an inner search for meaning. Although the Transcendentalist movement was overwhelmed by the materialism of the late-nineteenth century, in various guises it entered the mainstream of world philosophy, to inspire literary giants like Whitman and Melville and to invigorate generations of social reformers.
TRANSFORMATION— AN AMERICAN DREAM Historian Daniel Boorstin said of America, “We began as a Land of the Otherwise. Nothing is more distinctive, nor has made us more un-European than our disbelief in the ancient, well documented impossibilities."
There is a kind of dynamic innocence in the American notion that anyone who really wants to can beat the odds or the elements. Americans have little sense of keeping in their place. The myth of transcendence is perpetuated by a pantheon of wilderness explorers and moon explorers, record breakers in every field of endeavor, heroic figures like Helen Keller and “Lucky" Lindbergh.
Because the dream of renewal is built in, the American character is fertile ground for the notion of transformation. When a Stanford psychologist, Alex Inkeles, compared American character traits to those of Europeans, as evidenced in a 1971 poll, and then compared the most pronounced American traits to those observed in the culture two hundred years ago, he found a surprising continuity in ten traits. [2]
Americans take unusual pride in their freedoms and in their constitution, a pride that both impressed and irritated Tocqueville on his visit to the new republic.
Americans express greater self-reliance than Europeans. They are likelier to blame themselves for whatever has gone wrong, Inkeles said. They believe strongly in voluntarism, and they are “joiners." They are trusting, they think they can change the world, they believe that striving brings success, they are innovative and open.
The survey showed Americans to be more anti-authoritarian than Europeans and to have a stronger sense of the “quality" of the self, the importance of the individual.
These traits are clearly compatible with the process and discoveries of personal transformation discussed in Chapters 3 and 4: freedom, the self as powerful and responsible, connection to others, support network, autonomy, openness. Personal transformation, in effect, is an enactment of the original American dream.
THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION The Second American Revolution — the revolution to achieve freedom in a larger dimension — awaited critical numbers of agents of change and a means of easy communication among them. In 1969, in Without Marx or Jesus, Jean-Francois Revel described the United States as the most eligible prototype nation for world revolution. "Today in America — the child of European imperialism — a new revolution is rising. It is the revolution of our time . . . and offers the only possible escape for mankind today."
Real revolutionary activity, he noted, consists of transforming reality, that is, in making reality conform more closely to one's ideal. When we speak of "revolution" we must necessarily speak of something that cannot be conceived or understood within the context of old ideas. The stuff of revolution, and its first success, must be the ability to innovate. In that sense, there is more revolutionary spirit in the United States today, even on the Right, than elsewhere on the Left.
The relative freedom in the United States would make it possible for such a revolution to occur bloodlessly, Revel said. If that happened, and if one political civilization were exchanged for another, as seemed to be happening, the impact might be felt worldwide by osmosis. This radical transformation would need the simultaneous occurrence of smaller revolutions — in politics, society, international and interracial relations, cultural values, and technology and science. "The United States is the only country where these revolutions are simultaneously in progress and organically linked in such a way as to constitute a single revolution."
There also must be an internal critique of injustices, of the management of material and human resources, and of abuses of political power. Above all, there must be criticism of the culture itself: its morality, religion, customs, and arts. And there must be demand for respect of the individual's uniqueness, with the society regarded as the medium for individual development and for brotherhood.
Like Transcendentalism, Revel's revolution would encompass "the liberation of the creative personality and the awakening of personal initiative" as opposed to the closed horizons of more repressive societies. The perturbation would come from the privileged classes, he said, because that is the way of revolutions. They are launched by those disenchanted with the culture's ultimate reward system. If a new prototype of society is to emerge, rather than a coup d'etat, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels.
Certainly the sixties saw great social turbulence; members of the middle and upper classes, especially, began to criticize existing institutions and speculate on a new society. Strong social and historical forces were converging to create the disequilibrium that precedes revolution. Americans were increasingly aware of the impotence of existing institutions — government, schools, medicine, church, business — to deal collectively with mounting problems.
The disenchantment with mores and institutions was most visible in the counterculture, but it spread quickly. The society's discontent and ripeness for new direction was evident in the rapid assimilation of counterculture concerns, values, behavior, fashion, and music.
Wave after wave of social protest reflected growing skepticism about authority, [3] more sensitivity to contradictions in the society — the juxtaposition of poverty and affluence, scarcity and consumerism. There were marches, lie-ins, sit-ins, be-ins, press conferences, riots. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the Free Speech Movement, the ecology movement. Women's rights and gay rights. The Gray Panthers, antinuclear prayer vigils, taxpayers' revolts, demonstrations for and against abortion. All the groups cribbed strategies from their predecessors, including tactics for making the six o'clock news.
Meanwhile the rising interest in psychedelics dovetailed with media coverage of new discoveries about altered consciousness via meditation research and biofeedback training. The body-mind discoveries — the extraordinary connection between state of mind and state of health — buttressed the interest in human potential. Imported phenomena like acupuncture further challenged Western models of how things work.
One observer described the tumultuous events of the 1960s as the Great Refusal, when millions seemed to be saying no to conventions and concessions that had been taken for granted for generations. It was as if they were acting out Edward Carpenter's prophecy that the time would surely come when great numbers would rise up against mindless conformity, bureaucracies, warmaking, dehumanizing work, needless sickness. In discovering those regions of mind in which they transcend “the little, local self," human beings would create an agenda for the renewal of society.
To historian William McLoughlin, the sixties marked the beginning of America's fourth “great awakening," a cultural dislocation and revitalization that will extend into the 1990s. [4] These periodic awakenings, which take place over a generation or more, "are not periods of social neurosis but of revitalization. They are therapeutic and cathartic, not pathological." They result from a crisis in meaning: The ways of the culture no longer match the beliefs and behavior of the people. Although an awakening begins first with disturbance among individuals, it results in the shift of the whole worldview of a culture. "Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders."
American history, according to McLoughlin, is best understood as a millenarian movement, driven by a changing spiritual vision. Although it keeps redefining itself to meet contingencies and new experiences, there is one constant: "the fundamental belief that freedom and responsibility will perfect not only the individual but the world." This sense of a sacred collective purpose, which sometimes led to aggression in the past, has metamorphosed in this fourth awakening to a sense of the mystical unity of humankind and the vital power of harmony between human beings and nature.
McLoughlin calls attention to the model of social change formulated by anthropologist Anthony C.W. Wallace in a 1956 essay. Periodically, according to Wallace, the people in a given culture find that they can no longer travel its "mazeways," the orienting patterns and paths that have guided their predecessors. The "old lights" or customary beliefs do not fit current experience. Nothing is working because the solutions lie outside the accepted patterns of thought.
A few individuals, then great numbers, lose their bearings and begin to generate political unrest. As controversy grows, the traditionalists or "nativists," those who have most at stake in the old culture or who are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon the people back to the "old lights." Mistaking symptoms for causes, they sanction or punish the new behaviors. Eventually, however, as McLoughlin described it, "accumulated pressures for change produce such acute personal and social stress that the whole culture must break the crust of custom, crash through the blocks in the mazeways, and find new socially structured avenues."
Then the "new light" is the consensus; it is first expressed in the more flexible members of the society who are willing to experiment with new mazeways or new lifestyles. Legal interpretation, family structure, sex roles, and school curricula change in response to the new vision, and gradually traditionalists drift into it as well.
Our present cultural transformation alarms conservatives and liberals alike with its radical new premises. Whereas conservatives have historically called for a return to civil law and order during periods of social turbulence, now "nativists" at both ends of the political spectrum are calling for a return to a lawful and orderly universe.
The fashionable label for psychological dissent, tantamount to the blanket charge of un-Americanism in the 1950s — is narcissism. Critics lump those seeking answers through inward search with hedonists and cultists, much as McCarthyites categorized political dissidents with criminals, drug addicts, and sexual deviants.
Someone is always trying to summon us back to a dead allegiance: Back to God, the simple-minded religion of an earlier day. "Back to the basics," simple-minded education. Back to simple-minded patriotism. And now we are being called back to a simple-minded "rationality" contradicted by personal experience and frontier science.
COMMUNICATIONS — OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM In an unsettled period the questions and alternatives posed by a minority, the challenges to authority and established values, can spread rapidly throughout a culture. By amplifying both the unrest and the options, a society's communications network acts much like a collective nervous system. In this sense, the technology that seemed for a time to betray us into a dehumanized future is a powerful medium for human connection.
"At the present moment," Gertrude Stein said in 1945, "America is the oldest country in the world because she was the first country into the Twentieth Century." The United States, with its sophisticated communications technology and its history of exploiting news and promoting new images, was indeed the logical arena for the opening stages of the revolution Revel predicted.
Just as transformation builds on wider awareness and connection in the individual brain, so our social imagination has been painfully, exquisitely enlivened by a nerve network of electronic sensing. Our awareness is joined in high human drama: political scandals, war and peacemaking, riots, accidents, grief, humor. And just as modem physics and Eastern philosophies are introducing a more integrated worldview to the West, our fluent media nervous system is linking our social brain. "Electronic circuitry," Marshall McLuhan said not long ago, "is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate, our Western legacy — are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
These nerveways transmit our shocks and aches, our high moments and low, moon landings and murders, our collective frustrations, tragedies and trivia, institutional breakdowns in living color. They amplify the pain from alienated parts of our social body. They help break our cultural trance, crossing borders and time zones, giving us glimpses of universal human qualities that illuminate our narrow ways and show us our connectedness. They give us models of transcendence: virtuoso performers and athletes, brave survivors, floods and fires, everyday heroism.
Our collective nervous system mirrors our decadence. It arouses our right brains with music, archetypal dramas, startling visual sensations. It keeps our dream journal, taking notes on our fantasies and nightmares to tell us what we most want, what we most fear. If we let it, our technology can shock us out of the sleepwalking of the centuries.
Max Lerner compared the society to a great organism with its own nervous system. "In recent decades we have witnessed a neural overburdening of society, a strain not unlike that which an individual feels when he finds himself on the brink of fatigue or a breakdown." Yet technology might now be applied to move us further into the exploration of states of consciousness, he said. "The new awareness movements, the new search for self, may make for cohesion rather than disintegration."
The links in the expanding nervous system are not only the vast networks of commercial television and the daily newspapers and radio, but "other knowing" — innovative public television and small radio stations, small publishers, cooperatives of small magazines. There are newsletters, proliferating journals and magazines, self-published books. Every neighborhood has its quick-print shops, every supermarket and library its copying machines. Ordinary citizens have access to audio and video cassettes, computer time, home computers, cooperative use of national long-distance lines, inexpensive electronic typesetting equipment. Everybody can be a Gutenberg. We communicate by bumper stickers and T-shirts.
And our national penchant for self-questioning and search has turned increasingly inward, not only through the ever-present pop psychology and self-help books, but in original, radical sources: the literature of transformation. The books of Teilhard, forbidden publication in his lifetime, now sell in the millions. Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Carl Rogers, J. Krishnamurti, Theodore Roszak, and Carlos Castaneda are hot properties on drugstore paperback racks.
And there are "new-age" publications of all kinds: radio programs and newsletters, directories of organizations, lists of resources, Yellow Pages and handbooks, and new journals about consciousness, myth, transformation, the future. Thousands of spiritual titles roll off the presses in inexpensive editions.
The "statements of purpose" of some of the transformation-oriented publications are clear about their commitment. East/West Journal, based in the Boston area, expresses an intention to "explore the dynamic equilibrium that unifies apparently opposite values: Oriental and Occidental, traditional and modern.... We believe in people's freedom to chart the course of their lives as a boundless adventure We invite you to join us in this voyage of discovery, whose point of origin is everywhere and whose goal is endless."
New Dimensions Foundation in San Francisco, which produces a syndicated radio show featuring interviews with the leading spokespeople on the subject of transformation, launched an "audio journal" — tape cassettes edited from its tens of thousands of hours of interviews, dating back to 1973. New Dimension's purpose is "to communicate the vision and the infinite possibilities of human potential ... to use the media to present new ideas, new choices, new options, new solutions ... to promote more communication about the nature of personal and social change.”
If we are to dream a larger American dream, we must go beyond our own experience, much as the authors of the Constitution immersed themselves in the political and philosophical ideas of many cultures and as the Transcendentalists synthesized insights from world literature and philosophy to frame their vision of inner freedom.
Most of all, we must let go of an inappropriate cynicism and dualism. Trust in the possibility of change and a sense of the connectedness of all of life are essential to social transformation.
Civilizations decline, Toynbee said, not so much because of invasions or other external forces but because of an internal hardening of ideas. The “elite creative minority" that once gave life to the civilization has been gradually replaced by another minority — still dominant, but no longer creative.
Creativity requires constant transformation, experimentation, flexibility. Cynicism, a chronic state of distrust, is antithetical to the openness necessary for a creative society. To the cynic, experiments are futile ... all conclusions are foregone. Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshal "facts.” Just as we must let go of dead philosophies, illusions, and old science to confront reality, so a country must keep challenging its traditions if it is to be transformed — if it wants renewal.
Through the heavy seas of crisis, through social movements and wars, depressions, scandals, betrayals, the United States has been consistently open to change. When a television interviewer asked Revel in 1978 for his current assessment of the potential for transformation in America, he said, "The United States is still the most revolutionary country in the world, the laboratory for society. All the experiments — social, scientific, racial, intergenerational — are taking place in the U.S."
The old hope of the Old World: a new world, a place for remaking oneself, a new start, a new life, freedom from tired identities and chafing limits. Historian C. Vann Woodward said, "The body of writings that make up Europe's America is enormous and still growing. Much of it has been speculative, uninformed, passionate, mythical, — about an America hoped for, dreamed of, despised, or instinctively feared."
Dreamed of. . .and feared. The very possibility that we can remake our destiny someplace is as threatening, in some ways, as the knowledge that there are systems for interior search.
“I say the sea is in," said poet Peter Levy. "... the new spirit is bluer than knowledge or history. In our lives, Europe is saying goodnight."
CALIFORNIA— LABORATORY FOR TRANSFORMATION We protect ourselves from change, even from the hope of change, by our superstitious cynicism. Yet all exploration must be fueled by hope.
When the Wright brothers were attempting to fly the Kitty Hawk, an enterprising journalist interviewed people in their hometown, Dayton, Ohio. One elderly man said that if God had wanted man to fly. He would have given him wings, "and what's more, if anybody ever does fly, he won't be from Dayton!" Seventy years later the first human-powered machine, the Gossamer Condor, became airborne. It had been built and flown in California — and Californians were not surprised. "If anybody ever does fly, he'll be from California."
California, named for a mythical island, has been an island of myth in the United States, sanctuary of the endangered dream. "The flashing and golden pageant of California," Walt Whitman called it:
I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of
years, till now deferred.
...
The new society at last . . .
clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America.
If America is free, California is freer. If America is open to innovation, innovation is California's middle name. California is not so much different from the rest of the country as it is more so, a writer observed as early as 1883. California is a preview of our national paradigm shifts as well as our fads and fashions.
In 1963 social critic Remi Nadeau predicted that California would soon be not the outpost but the wellspring of American culture. If Californians are developing a new society, "the effect on the nation may be more than incidental." California seemed a kind of "forcing house" of national character. "Having left behind the social inhibitions of his old hometown, the Californian is a sort of American in the making. What the American is becoming, the Californian is already.”
California, Nadeau said, is a magically honest and sometimes frightening mirror in which every national evil — and national good — can best be studied. "California contains not only a great danger, but a great hope. . . .Nowhere does the conflict between individual freedom and social responsibility have a more open arena or show a more advanced stage of struggle."
The essence of the democratic experiment is tested in the laboratory of California. Having tended our national myth, California, purveyor of our electronic and celluloid myths, transmits it to those looking for hope. If it can work in California, maybe it can be adapted and put to work elsewhere.
The idea of America as the land of opportunity is more visible in California than anywhere, said James Houston, author of Continental Drift. "California is still the state where anything seems possible, where people bring dreams they aren't allowed to have anyplace else. So the rest of the country watches what goes on, because it's like a prophecy."
A political writer referred to California as "a high-pressure microcosm of America, a fertile testing ground for national prominence in any field, particularly politics." James Wilson, in Challenge of California, made the point that the lack of party organization makes it easy for new groups to gain ascendancy in California. "These forces endeavor not so much to wrest power from those who hold it as to create power where none has existed before."
David Broder, a national political columnist, said in 1978 that California's government is "more provocative in its program assumptions and more talented in its top-level administration than any other in America today, including the government in Washington. The competition in performance and reputation between Sacramento and Washington will continue in coming years California is big enough to provide a yardstick for measuring Washington's performance."
In 1949, Carey McWilliams said in California: The Great Exception that the main difference between California and the rest of the country was that "California has not grown or evolved so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket- fashion. The lights went on all at once and have never dimmed."
Certainly California's wealth has been a major factor in the tilt of power and influence toward the West Coast. It is rich — the seventh richest "country" in the world — and it accounts for 12 percent of the Gross National Product of the United States. It is the most populous state in the country. Los Angeles County alone exceeds the population of forty-one states. A phenomenon that exists "only in California" may be very large indeed.
Californians had an early opportunity to become disenchanted with the mirage of a consumer heaven. Michael Davy, associate editor of The Observer in London, and that paper's former Washington correspondent, said in 1972:
Californians have the time, the money, and the assurance of future comfort that leaves them with no alternative but to confront their anxieties. Hitherto, only a tiny elite in any society has ever asked itself the question: What am I? The rest have either been too busy staying alive or have been ready to accept a system of belief handed down by the elite. In California, not only is there no general system of belief, but millions of people have the opportunity — and many of them the education — to worry about that dreadful void.
In an article titled "Anticipating America" in Saturday Review in late 1978, Roger Williams said that there is another California than the place America has come to imitate, mock, and envy. "One might call it California the future, the frontier — not frontier in the old Western sense but in the new national sense of innovativeness and openness."
California's continuing growth reinforces the openness, he said, forcing the state to face its larger problems head-on. "It is a sense of paradise possibly lost, as well as a pervasive feeling of community, that makes California the nation's most aggressive attacker of major social problems." Williams remarked on Californians' pervasive interest and involvement in public affairs, in commissions and agencies. California pioneered in major protective legislation for the environment, coastline conservation, energy research, and nuclear safeguards, he noted.
Boorstin once described the United States as a Nation of Nations, so shaped by the visions of its immigrants that it is international. Similarly, California is enriched by a diversity of cultures, influenced by an Asian and European influx, a junction of East and West, frontier for immigrants from the American East, South, and Midwest. More than half its inhabitants were born elsewhere.
California is also a synthesis of what C. P. Snow called the Two Cultures — Art and Science. Physicist Werner Heisenberg attributed the vitality and "human immediacy" of historic Munich to its historic blend of art and science. California is that blend in the United States. An estimated 80 percent of the country's pure science is pursued in California; its residents include more Nobel laureates than any other state, and a majority of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are Californians. The arts, both as business and avant-garde experimentation, are a major enterprise in California. One public official estimated that nearly half a million people in greater Los Angeles "strive to make their living through the arts." The nation's entertainment is produced largely in California. Actors, writers, musicians, painters, architects, and designers comprise a major industry. For better or for worse, they are in large measure creating the nation's culture.
Historian William Irwin Thompson said that California is not so much a state of the Union as it is a state of mind, "an imagination that seceded from our reality a long time ago." In leading the world in making a transition from industrial to postindustrial society, from hardware to software, from steel to plastic, from materialism to mysticism, "California became the first to discover that it is fantasy that leads reality, not the other way around." What we envision we can make real.
The California dream of sun and economic freedom, like the expansionist American dream, has always had a second body, a transcendental vision of another kind of light and another kind of freedom.
"The California Transcendentals" is the term given by critic Benjamin Mott to writers like Robinson Jeffers, John Muir, and Gary Snyder. "It's not just that, like Frost and Emerson, the California Transcendentals ask a certain height of us. They do. It's that at times they seem to be the only writers left in any region of this country with a clear idea of what elevation is. . . . Their true region is everywhere. In literary terms, they're indispensable."
If anything holds Californians together, Michael Davy suggested in 1972, it is "a search for a new religion," a vision that might emerge from "the mish-mash of Esalen-type thinking, revolutionary chatter, Huxleyan mysticism." Whatever the origin of these new stirrings, he said, they might well have import for the entire country.
"There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer," Thoreau once said, "and the farthest west is but the farthest east." Gustave Flaubert also associated the farthest west with the farthest east: "I kept dreaming of Asiatic journeys, of going overland to China, of impossibilities, of the Indies or of California.” When Thoreau and Flaubert wrote those words in the nineteenth century, the West Coast was already dotted with centers and study groups revolving around Buddhism and "Hindoo” teachings. Today the influence of Eastern thought in California is pervasive.
California is "a different kind of consciousness and a different kind of culture,” historian Page Smith said, possibly because of the large geographical transition made by its immigrants in the last century. "People leapt across whole barriers from Nebraska and Kansas, fifteen hundred miles to the Pacific Coast, and for a time there was a degree of isolation.” The state was also influenced by the long Spanish period and proximity to Mexico, the mild climate, the sense of a fresh start common to immigrant populations, and the lack of tradition.
It makes sense that the Aquarian Conspiracy would be most evident in a pluralistic environment friendly to change and experimentation, among people whose relative wealth has given them the opportunity to become disenchanted with the materialist dream in its most hedonistic form, with few traditions to overturn, tolerance of dissent, an atmosphere of experimentation and innovation, and a long history of interest in Eastern philosophy and altered states of consciousness.
CALIFORNIA AND THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY In 1962 Look magazine sent a team headed by Senior Editor George Leonard to prepare a special issue on California. The trends Look reported reveal the early roots of the Aquarian Conspiracy in California. They quote a San Francisco lay leader: "In California, the old social compartments are being broken down, and we are creating a new aristocracy — an aristocracy of those who care. Membership is restricted only by the capacity for concern.”
The magazine reported that California seemed to be developing "a new kind of society and perhaps even a new kind of person able to cope with it.” One of the phenomena the reporters mentioned was the apparent depth of relationships between friends, which they attributed to there being few relatives at hand.
Aldous Huxley, Look noted, was among the California residents calling for a new national constitutional convention. "Many Californians are holding, in a sense, constitutional conventions,” the magazine reported, "at centers such as the one in Santa Barbara [Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions], the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, and the Stanford Research Institute; at board meetings of great corporations or planning groups; in state and city governments, and sometimes even in the living rooms of tract houses whose inhabitants came not so long ago from Iowa, Maine, or Georgia."
Californians believe that anyone who cares to try can help shape the future, Look said, and quoted Alan Watts: "Traditional patterns of relating, based on locality, are askew. Old thought patterns are being broken down. What people in the East can't see is that new patterns are being developed."
In the 1950s and 1960s, Aldous Huxley, then living in Los Angeles, was among those who encouraged Michael Murphy and Richard Price in their 1961 decision to open Esalen, the residential center in California's Big Sur area that helped midwife much of what came to be known as the human-potential movement. Seminar leaders in Esalen's first three years included Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Arnold Toynbee, Linus Pauling, Norman O. Brown, Carl Rogers, Paul Tillich, Rollo May, and a young graduate student named Carlos Castaneda.
It was perhaps typical of the serendipity of those days that one evening in 1962 heavy fog on the treacherous coastal highway through Big Sur forced a vacationing Abraham Maslow to seek shelter at the nearest residence. Maslow drove down the unmarked driveway through a tangle of shrubs to inquire about accommodation for the night. He had arrived in time for an Esalen study group that was unpacking a case of twenty copies of his latest book.
Maslow's alliance with Esalen was an important linkage of networks on the two coasts. And in 1965 George Leonard and Michael Murphy joined forces. Leonard's account of their first meeting and subsequent collaboration conveys the intellectual excitement and visionary quality of the movement's earliest days. It also reveals the genesis of popular misunderstandings about what it meant.
In 1964 and 1965 Leonard traveled around the country, working on what he believed would be the most important story of his career. It would run in two or three subsequent issues of Look, he anticipated, and he intended to call it "The Human Potential." [5]
Several people had mentioned a rather mysterious young man named Michael Murphy, who ran a seemingly unclassifiable institute on the wild Big Sur coast of central California. I was told that Murphy, like the hero of Maugham's The Razor's Edge, had gone to India seeking enlightenment, had lived for eighteen months at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. ... The institute was supposedly a forum for new ideas, especially those that combined the wisdom of East and West. I heard that Esalen's first brochure flew under the title of a series of 1961 lectures by Aldous Huxley: "Human Potentialities."
As Leonard recalled their first meeting:
The dinner was magical. Murphy's knowledge of Eastern philosophy was encyclopedic, and he talked about it as if it were a delicious tale of suspense and adventure. He had a strong sense of history and a compelling vision of the future. Nor was Murphy the kind of guru-seeker you can sometimes spot by the vague look in their eyes This seeker was on a decidedly American sadhana. You could easily see him in a warm-up suit, never in a flowing white robe ....
After dinner we drove to my house and continued talking for hours. The meeting of minds, of visions, was extraordinary, with each of us bringing just what was needed in the way of background knowledge to dovetail with that of the other. While Murphy had been studying Eastern philosophy and humanistic psychology, I had been studying social and political movements in the United States.
They met at a vivid moment in the nation's history, Leonard recalls: Lyndon Johnson was pushing an idealist civil rights bill and his "war on poverty." There was a sense of changing consciousness in the country as social movements proliferated: sexual liberation, the Free Speech Movement, concern for the rights of Chicanos and American Indians, and, above all, the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.
In the spirit of those times, it was natural to think in terms of "movements." Just as the civil rights movement would break down the barriers between the races, and thus other barriers, a human potential movement would help break down the barriers between mind and body, between Eastern wisdom and Western action, between individual and society, and thus between the limited self and the potential self.
Soon Leonard, Murphy, and others were not only planning residential programs at Esalen but seeking ways the insights of this new human-potential movement could be applied to the larger society. They saw its relevance to education, politics, health care, race relations, and city planning. Such divergent notables as B. F. Skinner and S. I. Hayakawa led Esalen seminars in the fall of 1965, along with Watts, Carl Rogers, J. B. Rhine, and others. Leonard said:
It was a heady time. Will Schutz and Fritz Peris came to live at Esalen. New methods proliferated. The Esalen lodge became a carnival of innovation. ... In 1967 the institute opened a branch in San Francisco to take on urban problems. I joined forces with the distinguished black psychiatrist Price Cobbs to lead marathon interracial confrontations. Mike Murphy moved to the city. Best yet — oh, glorious, golden days of grace! — all this happened pretty much out of the public eye.
Then came the media — the television and radio reports, the magazine articles, the books — and we were faced with the contradictions, the paradoxes, and the heartaches that inevitably accompany any serious challenge to cultural homeostasis.
Time's education section included what Leonard called a fairly objective article about Esalen in the fall of 1967, and United Press International covered Esalen's move to San Francisco.
But it remained for a remarkable piece of writing in the December 31, 1967, issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine to open the floodgates.
I had learned by then that much of the publishing world used a very simple method of certification and reality testing: Until something appeared in the New York Times, you couldn't be sure it was real. When something appeared in a favorable light in the Times, you could bet it was not only real but worthy of further coverage. . . .
So here we had "Joy is the Prize” by Leo Litwak, telling of the author's personal experience in a five-day Will Schutz encounter group and speculating on the Esalen vision. The article had the requisite air of initial skepticism and closing irony but was generally positive. . . . Within days of its publication, editors all over New York were being bombarded with queries about doing a story, a show, a book on this strange place on the California coast and the "movement” it portended.
Esalen did not welcome the publicity. Its policy had been to cooperate with reporters but to discourage coverage whenever possible.
Although only 15 percent of Esalen's programs were encounter groups, Litwak had written about an encounter group, which led other reporters and the public to associate Esalen with them forever. Some reporters, bewildered by the wealth of new ideas at Esalen, finding them hard to categorize, settled for cynicism. Others became true believers, Leonard said, and "helped create false expectations that led to eventual disillusionment."
Inevitably, human-potential centers were springing up around the country. At various times Murphy and Price were approached by individuals wanting to affiliate with Esalen, using the name for their own centers. They refused but actively encouraged all competition.
The new society forming had spiritual underpinnings that were hard to identify. Jacob Needleman, reflecting in 1973 on his first years in California, said:
The person I was then could never have undertaken to write this book [The New Religions ] Even apart from my intellectual convictions, there was this whole matter of California. As a transplanted Easterner, I felt duty-bound not to take anything in California very seriously. I certainly felt no need to understand California To me it was a place desperately lacking in the experience of limitation. . . .
I still do not claim to understand California, but I am certain that it cannot be taken lightly from any point of view Something is struggling to be born here.
... I wish I could state clearly what it is about California that makes so many of its people — and not just the young — so much more accessible to the cosmic dimension of human life — But the undeniable fact is that by and large the West Coast does not exhibit the sort of intellectualism found in our eastern cities, an intellectualism rooted in [the] European sense of the human mind as autonomous and outside nature.
In any case, it is not reality which Californians have left behind; it is Europe.... I began to see that my idea of intelligence was a modem European idea; the mind, unfettered by emotion, disembodied, aristocratically articulate I saw that I had judged California on its lack of the European element.
The Aquarian Conspiracy, needless to say, is nurtured in California. [6] Its “agents" from the Boston- Cambridge area, from New York and Washington, London, Denver, Minneapolis, Houston, Chicago, and hundreds of smaller cities rally in California from time to time for sustenance and courage.
The large “consciousness" conference, a California invention of the early 1970s, was a perfect device for this national crossfertilization. Beginning in 1975, California groups began organizing road shows — conferences and seminars all over the country. [7] In many cities strong local links were then established, and subsequent programs were staged by locals. Conference budgets tried to provide for continuous liaison. Small workshops proved even more flexible strategies for moving people about the country. Through such meetings the conspirators typically pooled the names of friends and contacts, quickly enlarging and linking the networks. Cassette tapes of conference lectures were disseminated by the thousand.
Ironically, while the eastern United States tends to patronize the West Coast as a bizarre relative. Radio Television Belgium sent a team to Los Angeles to film a documentary on how the 1960s counterculture had affected the 1970s, explaining that “what happens in California will eventually happen in Europe."
If California has once again anticipated the next step, the prospects for national change are strong indeed.
DESPERATION AND RENEWAL James Alan McPherson, a young Black who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, recently traced the advancement of freedoms from the Magna Carta to the Charter of the United Nations. “In the gradual elaboration of basic rights," he said, “an outline of something much more complex than 'black' and 'white' had begun." A new citizenship becomes possible in which “each United States citizen [could] attempt to approximate the ideals of the nation, be on at least conversant terms with all its diversity, and carry the mainstream of the culture inside himself."
Each American would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal. “If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American."
He quoted the Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who called attention to the adoption of the word desperado in English: “It is despair, and despair alone, that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope." McPherson added:
I believe that the United States is complex enough to induce that sort of despair that begets heroic hope. I believe that if one can experience its diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself “citizen of the United States." . . . One will have begun on that necessary movement.
This movement from a hopeless person to a desperado, he said, is “the only new direction I know."
American society has at hand most of the factors that could bring about collective transformation: relative freedom, relative tolerance, affluence enough to be disillusioned with affluence, achievements enough to know that something different is needed. We have been temperamentally innovative, bold, and confident. Our national myth says that we can have the alternative if we have the imagination and the will.
“To be an American," said social and literary critic Leslie Fiedler, “is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than inherit one. We have always been inhabitants of myth rather than history."
To imagine a destiny, to transcend a past . . . We have little to lose by the remaking of our family institutions. We have begun to know our complex selves: our roots, our collective mid-life crisis, our sexuality and death and renewal, our paradoxical yearning for both freedom and order, our costly addictions. We sense the limits of our old science, the dangers of our top-heavy hierarchies, and we see the context of our planet.
We begin to feel our tangible and spiritual connection with other cultures. We have awakened our power to learn and to change.
And we have ideas.
Afraid or not, we seem to have made it past the entry point into real transformation: past the cultural shake-up, the violence, the fascination and excesses, the fear of the new and uncharted. We have begun to imagine the possible society.
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Notes:1 The Adams family, which produced two American presidents, belonged to a Druidic sect that had been persecuted in England. In the American revolutionary period. Freemasonry was nearer its medieval beginnings and was more a mystical brotherhood than essentially the social lodge it became after widespread persecution of Masons in the nineteenth century.
Among the colonial Masons were George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere. Fifty of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence are supposed to have been Masons. Historian Charles Ferguson described Washington's army as a "Masonic convention," noting that the revolutionaries relied on the brotherhood for most of their communications. Franklin obtained French aid by way of his Masonic connections in France, and Washington himself initiated Lafayette into the order.
Because the brotherhood was supposed to transcend national or political loyalties, revolutionary soldiers are said to have carefully returned the lost papers of a British field lodge; and the apparent laxness of some British generals was attributed to their hope for a quick and bloodless settlement so that Mason would not be set against Mason.
2 Over the same period there have been three major changes in the American character: an increasing tolerance of diversity, an erosion of the ethic of hard work and frugality, and a concern about the loss of control over the political system.
3 The growing use of marijuana dealt a blow to authority: medical, legal, and parental. Hundreds of thousands of rural and small-town youths who might never have encountered marijuana in peacetime were introduced to the drug in Vietnam. Ironically, the introduction of major psychedelics, like LSD, in the 1960s was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own "add." By 1973, according to the National Commission on Drug and Marijuana Abuse, nearly 5 percent of all American adults had tried LSD or a similar major psychedelic at least once.
4 The Puritan Awakening (1610-1640) preceded the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in England. The first great awakening in America (1730-1760) led to the creation of the American republic; the second (1800-1830), to the solidification of the Union and the rise of Jacksonian participatory democracy; the third (1890-1920), to rejection of unregulated capitalistic exploitation and the beginning of the welfare state. Our fourth appears headed toward a rejection of unregulated exploitation of humankind and of nature and toward conservation and optimal use of the world's resources.
5 Leonard's article, which eventually ran to twenty thousand words, was never published. Look decided it was "too long and too theoretical."
6 Although nearly half of those responding to the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire now live in California, most were born in the East or Midwest. The role of California and its immigrants as catalysts for social transformation was proclaimed in the invitation to a 1979 conference in Sacramento, "California Renaissance," sponsored by the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Participants were to look at the "significance, promise, and dangers of the California experience" in terms of personal and planetary evolution.
7 Two of the earliest such conferences were sponsored, interestingly, by the Lockheed Corporation. They were held in the San Jose area in 1971 and featured scientists and physicians.