E Pluribus Unum

On our American dollar it says: e pluribus unum, out of the many one. I would like to talk about the exact opposite: out of the One, the many. What I’m going to try and do is to establish an integral and integrative understanding of who we are as a people in relationship not only to ourselves and our two-party system but also to the other cultures, to the other species, and to the life systems of the Earth in which we find ourselves embedded. If we don’t come up with a viable spirituality, a spirituality that sees as its deepest moral dilemma the relationship to life itself, and if we don’t come up with a politic that expresses that integral relationship, then we really do go on doing exactly what we’ve been doing. And in my mind, that may just be okay. That just may be the way the world is.
In Chapter 27 of my book, The Modern Christian Mystic, I talk about a moral relationship with life itself at every level- not just human. The politics of decency are an attempt to really stretch what that means. Not to try and transcend the separation between church and state but to affirm it and say that no religion has the right to dominate because our Constitution guarantees the right of freedom of religion to all walks of faith. The separation has nothing to do with a moral relationship to life itself. All religious traditions assert that moral relationship between humans, between the human and God and between the human and the life systems of the planet. I’ve laid out a nuts and bolt look at these three relationships in chapter 11 of my book Cultural Addiction.
Out of the many, One: we, as Americans, are the experiment of God for a unified planet because we have every creed, race, every opinion, etc. We are all gathered in this one place to try and work out the protocols for what we must do in order to survive. Remember what I said: we are one planet ecologically, one planet economically, one planet technologically, yet we are medieval culturally. We are still not understanding the interior, the soul of each other both individually and collectively. This is where we need to go. We are still operating out of true ignorance towards the other cultures. What do we really know about the Chinese and their experience? It’s not enough to call them Communists. They are also the Taoists and the Confucians that have a deep and magnificent cultural history that spans millennia, not two hundred years. When we look at India, what do we see? A people who worship cows and have millions starving to death? Well they have a tradition in Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism that reaches back into pre-history! It goes beyond what we can even record! To be making decisions about these cultures with no understanding of the depth and profundity of what these people have to say is truly to operate in ignorance. We don’t know what makes these people tick. If we are to embrace our role as God’s experiment in oneness, we must delve deeper… perhaps this blog, this radio show, my work and yours, can help achieve this goal.