Recently I was browsing the bookstore (an actual one, with books!), when my eyes fell on three of my favorite authors. Like a spark across the gap, my mind was inspired. Months ago I had chosen a blog domain name “Tracts of Revolution,” with a vague intention of what I would do with it. Revolution seemed right: there has been a growing interest over the past decades in what is called the New Consciousness – a higher awareness of our place as humans in the expanding web of existence.
This awareness has “come to light” at various times and places throughout our history through individual men and women, who break open the box of cultural conventions that serve to domesticate our animal energies and secure our membership in the group. As instinct concerns the body (the organism and its reproductive success), tribal membership is about ego – the little identity we construct in the social nexus of our relationships. Is this all that we are? Perhaps our fate as a species is to work interminably (until we do ourselves in) on keeping our boxes in order, repairing them from time to time, and trading them in for more up-to-date ones as we bump along.
Not so, according to our brighter lights. There is also soul; not the old ego again, grasping at immortality and chasing its far glory, but a place (which is really no place) in each of us where all the clutching-and-chasing of individual life is (or can be) released into the vast mystery of being and received afresh again. This mystical rhythm of releasing and receiving, letting go and taking in, has been conceived in the wisdom traditions as the exhalation and inhalation of spirit (with etymology tracing through all the ancient languages to the life-power of breath).
Thus, in addition to an animal body and a tribal ego, we have a spiritual soul – although it’s only a stubborn habit of ego to believe that we “have” any of these. We ARE body, ego and soul. Each of these modes of being connects us to a distinct aspect of our human reality, not as pieces that might be added or taken away, but as inseparable parts of a whole.
Our brighter lights, both living and gone, serve as portals of a greater vision where the whole is revealed in profoundly unique yet perennially consistent ways. What’s perennial (enduring) is the greater vision itself. It’s not the particulars of mythology in which it may be packaged, but the transcendental unity refracted through them to the contemplative mind. The uniqueness, on the other hand, is a function of the visionary’s personality, genetic temperament, life experiences, historical time and cultural place.
One might use a fairly traditional religious vocabulary in rendering the mystery, as another speaks against religion. One might cross-reference different belief systems in an effort to highlight their shared assumptions and aspirations, while another tunnels through the baseboards to reveal their common origins. Still another might scandalize the rest of us proper citizens by pulling at the support beams, forcing us to see just how much of it is held together by pretense, bad faith, and blind tradition.
The book titles jumped out at me. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche was one of his great prophecies of our human fate. Sadly he died insane just before the dawn of the 20th century and his voice was lost under the growing rumble of the coming World Wars. Nietzsche was a key figure in the rise of a philosophical approach called constructivism, which holds that meaning is made (constructed) and not discovered. All of our belief systems are so much scaffolding erected against the Mystery; all we really have is “perspective,” never truth.
After the Wars, during the 1950s and 60s, two more lights shined into the cultural night. In 1951 a disaffected Anglican priest by the name of Alan Watts published The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, in which he offered a fresh analysis of the generalized angst that hung over the First-World cultures. Watts was fond of analogies and frequently warned that defining reality in our doctrines is like trying to bite a wall, or like dipping our buckets in the living stream and walking off with the river. His own attraction was to Buddhism, especially Zen, with its teaching of living mindfully in the unresolvable paradoxes of existence.
In the following decade, Abraham Heschel collected some early essays and addresses under the 
title The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (1972). Heschel was a philosopher, poet and activist in the tradition of Jewish mysticism and wrote numerous books on religion and the spiritual life. For him, spiritual life cannot be divorced from our social responsibilities on behalf of the oppressed, the exploited, and the outcast. Heschel walked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march for civil rights, demonstrating his belief that what unites us is ultimately stronger than what divides us.
The Project
Tracts of Revolution is intended to be a conversation with, as well as a contrived dialogue between, two or more of our “brighter lights” from the history of philosophy, spirituality, art, science and politics. A few of them enjoyed success during their lifetime — Alan Watts even became something of a cult celebrity during the 1960s; but many died in obscurity, misunderstood or entirely ignored by their contemporaries. Even if they managed to attract attention, gain followers, and instigate creative change (revolution) while alive, a majority of them have been forgotten – or if remembered, then only memorialized.
Our treasury of revealed wisdom is fast approaching a minimum balance; soon we will have to start paying steep service fees for our career as a species on this planet. All of the – news release! – deep cancers in Gaia’s lungs (atmosphere), body (soil) and blood (water) that can be traced to human waste and rampant consumerism, along with the violent conflicts of nations, races, ideologies and lifestyles – many wonder whether we’ve already fallen past the point of recovery. I don’t believe we have … yet.
I want to engage a conversation not only about revolution (creative change), but a conversation that will serve to ignite a revolution in our time. There are a lot of voices – many best-selling authors and inspirational speakers – proclaiming that the way through will be by the route of a new metaphysics (quantum, new science), ancient magic (Mayan, Egyptian), hidden codes (Bible prophecy, DaVinci paintings), or telepathic communication (departed loved ones, spirit guides).
It’s not my intention to sweep them all under the same judgment, for perhaps some good has or will yet come of them; but I suspect they are more distractions than genuine revelations. What we need now is not just more lights, but better light – enough to wake us up, and enough to guide us along the way to what we are becoming … which is more human, I hope.
You are invited to join me in this conversation across time. For a while, I’ll be immersing myself in the above-mentioned writings of Nietzsche, Watts and Heschel, spinning out the implications of what I hear them saying, and staging a series of conversations between them. What will come of it? Hard to say, and impossible to predict; but I have a “hopeful suspicion” that something revolutionary will come to light – a message both timeless and timely.
Tracts of Revolution 