Transcendent Society http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/ A discussion of issues of and opportunities for spiritual social transformation in the 21st century en-us Nucleus CMS v3.33 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://thanelegacy.com/commentary//nucleus/nucleus2.gif Transcendent Society http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/ Season of Peace and Thanksgiving http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=4 Thanksgiving Day, 2006

With the Thanksgiving holiday we are “turning the corner” on the year and heading – increasingly, it seems, with vertiginous fury – toward the winter holiday season. But if we rein in the urge to go racing off down the slopes toward the new year, maybe we can learn something of use: something of gratitude and something of peace.

I am endebted to Prof. Aubrey Williams at the University of Maryland, who brought some interesting information about the Thanksgiving holiday to light :

• An epidemic had wiped out thousands of American Indians along the North Atlantic coast three years before the Mayflower landed. The Plymouth Company knew of this. Far from breaking new ground, the newcomers took over cleared fields and a harbor that had belonged to the Patuxet tribe.

• Scurvy and pneumonia killed more than half the Pilgrims during the first year, leaving 50 survivors, including just 5 of 18 wives.

• Plymouth colony governor William Bradford ordered the first thanksgiving feast, following established English traditions of harvest celebrations. The Indians also had a traditional harvest feast, the Green Corn Dance. The 50 colonists were joined by 90 Indians (only men are mentioned). The Indians brought 5 deer. There were also turkeys, wild geese, ducks, lobsters, eels, clams, oysters, and fish; also dried berries and fruits, biscuits, and English wheat bread as well as various corn dishes which the Indian guide Squanto had instructed the colonists to make. There was no pumpkin pie. That came later.

• It’s likely that the five surviving women and a handful of children and young girls prepared the food to serve 140 people for three days.

• The feast was not repeated the following year because the harvest was too meagre. George Washington set aside a national day of Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789, but it was not regularly observed by later presidents. Our modern celebration dates to 1863 when Abraham Lincoln set aside the 4th Thursday in November as a national holiday to muster Union patriotism. The Pilgrims wre not part of this national holiday until the 1890s, and the term “pilgrim” was not used until the 1870s.

Sources include James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), Ralph and Adelin Linton's We Gather Together : The Story of Thanksgiving (1949), and Laurie Weinstein Farson's The Wampanoag (1989).Responding to the inevitable hatreds that emerge on all sides in the middle of a hideous civil war, Lincoln drew not only on the common history of the founding of the nation but on an ancient spiritual principle : gratitude – the principle of the recognition and acknowledgement of present good and applied it in the face of apparent evil.

Lincoln has impressive spiritual lessons for us when we put ourselves in his place. A man of power leading a victorious Union in 1865, he eschewed the punitiveness that many Northerners were calling for and insisted that task at hand was a matter of “binding up the nation’s wounds” and doing so “with malice toward none.” I guess it’s easier to say that when you are the winner, but how many winners do, these days ?

Lincoln’s eye was not on rebellious states which ought to be punished but on a glorious Union which could not be broken; not on separateness but on seamless singularity. Every day we are asked where our vision will be placed – on what we will attend. We can easily be drawn into the “10,000 things” of our material life, and thus into a viewpoint of separateness that is fragmented and unstable. Yet, at every moment we are faced also with the transcendent Self which is ever present and ever awaiting our acknowledgement. Which shall we serve ?

The more we immerse ourselves in a spiritual practice the more we understand that only the transcendent will satisfy. One sure way to remind ourselves of the present good of transcendent reality is to “. . . count and score the things that [we are] grateful for . . .” as jazz legend Hadda Brooks so beautifully put it. When we do, Thanksgiving comes every day.

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One of the watchwords of the winter holiday season is peace. It’s interesting that people have come to refer to the Friday after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday.” For retailers it’s black as in being “in the black” as opposed to being “in the red;” for the rest of us, it’s black because it’s the day of the year on which more retail sales are rung up than any other day. There’s not much peace in the shopping malls on that day, it seems. In fact, prognosticators use the volume recorded on the day after Thanksgiving to predict what kind of retail season it will be for the holidays. It will be interesting to find out how much retail traffic has moved to the internet just to avoid the crowds.

There is a perennial message of peace, and hope for peace, during this season, and it will be especially poignant this year with the Iraq engagement going so badly. All the hope for peace and desire for peace has not produced peace, obviously.

That “peace is not simply the absence of war” has been long recognized.

One of the most important developments in the national political scene is also one of the least heralded. During the Bush administration the U.S. Institute of Peace, established by Congress in 1984, has quietly burgeoned into a significant contributor to the national discourse. Indeed, the Iraq Study Group which has become so central to the desire to make changes in the Iraq policy is based at USIP. The brainchild and passion of late Hawaii Sen. Spark Matsunaga, the Institute has slowly but surely established its credentials as a vital non-partisan source of expertise in peacemaking. Marking its 20th anniversary, USIP President, former ambassador Richard Solomon, put the case bluntly : “If we fail to transform the way we deal with conflict we, and the world, face a bleak future.”

On President Bush’s watch the Institute also was given one of the last remaining spots on the National Mall to build its headquarters. (At the moment it occupies a couple floors of a non-descript office building on 17th Street in Washington DC.) This support for the USIP is one area where the current administration deserves unalloyed commendation.

The U.S. Institute of Peace is dedicated to political, economic, and social processes that produce peaceful resolution of problems. It looks at peace in terms of strategic vision (which is a welcome change as far as strategy goes, wouldn’t you say ?). Yet, the source of genuine peace, so many great teachers have pointed out, is within each of us. As long as the heart is in anguish there can be no peace. We yearn for peace but cannot make peace with our neighbor – this is the little peace, the peace of relationship, from which our larger communal peace grows. We do not succeed because we retain a materialistic world view that makes it impossible to forgive our neighbor’s crimes, or what pass for crimes in our view.

In fact, in order to truly forgive we must understand our neighbor as something other than the clod who lives next door and whose television disturbs us from time to time. This is spiritual work, and it doesn’t matter what path you follow to get some understanding – as long as you do.

It is the time of year when the birth of Christ is celebrated. To bring about “peace on earth, good will toward men” we each are faced with the task of bringing about the birth of Christ within ourselves. This birth is the dawning of a transcendent understanding that Divine Reality lives in every person. From that place we can find what we need to release the pains that fill our heart with anguish. Without it there will never be peace, because we see in a glass darkly and not face-to-face. Face-to-face viewing of the Christ reality transforms and redeems the world – our world – and delivers us to redemptive understanding of ourselves and our relations.]]> Spirituality and Social Change http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=4 Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:10:15 -0500 Moyers and Tippitt : Exploring spirituality in public discourse http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=3 Faith & Reason, airing Friday nights. The time in the Washington DC market is 9:30 p.m. The show currently (1 July 2006) appears at the top of the listings on the PBS home page, which may indicate that the criticisms leveled against Moyers by certain Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives have not succeeded in marginalizing him. Moyers has been on the offensive in recent years, decrying the hegemony of corporate power and the undue influence of religion on public policy in public addresses from commencement ceremonies to the annual meeting of the Public Broadcasting Service. In an address to that meeting on 31 May 2006, Moyers countered allegations that PBS coverage is “unbalanced” by calling for a commitment to balance the reporting spun by corporate and political elites with reporting on life as it is lived by the ordinary person. His new series seems to want to find a balance between religious faith and rational secularism, but the first segment, aired 23 June 2006 and featuring Salman Rushdie, may not have done the best job of setting the tone.Rushdie is understandably strident on the issue of free speech and religious zealotry, since he spent quite a few years of the prime of his life in hiding from those who decided that his writings represented a crime against Islam, punishable by death. Although Moyers asked good questions, the conversation seemed more of a monologue by Rushdie and less of a dialogue among elements of faith and reason. The second episode suited the theme much better. Mary Gordon and Colin McGinn provided greater layering of the interplay involved in these issues.

(Rushdie shows more conviviality during an interview with film director Terry Gilliam at the 2002 Telluride Film Festival. A video copy of the conversation is part of the DVD “Lost in La Mancha,” a documentary film about Gilliam’s catastrophic effort to shoot “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in Spain. An entertaining transcript can be found on the website for The Believer magazine.)

The setting for the show seems almost to subvert the desire for a straightforward, un-spun conversation that Moyers has articulated in speeches like those referenced above. The elaborate background features his signature, a vanity very unlike him. The guests are seated in a pair of commodious leather chairs, and a large, low table in the foreground suggests that lots of intellectual material might be deployed there. Standard reverse-angle camera shots are augmented by tracking long-shots that make the signature float between the speakers like a ghost. The word for all of this is “sumptuous;” Moyers’ make-up is heavy (he is, after all, getting up there), although they haven’t gone so far as to shoot him through gauze.

The evolution of production values over the last 25 years toward warm colors and self-indulgence (or cool tones and hyper-stimulation) could well be the subject of a future posting. For the moment we might understand the setting simply by acknowledging that PBS will look to sell copies of the series to raise some of the money it needs to retain a modicum of independence in its reporting.

Krista Tippitt
One of the most refreshing perspectives to emerge in recent years is that of Krista Tippitt’s weekly broadcast, Speaking of Faith. Since stumbling upon her show about two years ago I have tuned in regularly, either on the radio, by downloading from Audible.com or, more recently, via podcast. Tippitt’s subtitle / mission statement - “Public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas” – accurately characterizes the breadth of her project. Her interviewees include Nobel Prize winners, theologians, philosphers, professors, and activists, and the questions she brings to her interlocutors demonstrate a keen mind convinced of the importance of spiritual perspectives in every corner of the public and private arena. A preponderance of Christian and Jewish thinkers is thoughtfully augmented by representatives of Islam, Buddhism, and other religions, as well as people whose spirituality shows up in a commitment to ethical behavior or environmental consciousness.

Tippitt’s journalism illuminates by contrast. Her editorial comments are cogent and evocative, leaving the listener with plenty to think about. Nowhere is this seen more vividly than in her August 2004 broadcast on The Power of Fundmentalism. She interviewed Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalists to shed light on a controversial subject by allowing her guests to speak for themselves. You should take the time to listen to it – right away.

Personal favorites :


Some disappointments include a look into “Pagans Ancient and Modern,” “Stress and the Balance Within,” and the inevitable “Deciphering the DaVinci Code.” The wonderful thing about Krista Tippitt’s work is that even the disappointments hold more nuggets of the authentic than we’re used to hearing these days. Her impeccable research is guided by a curiosity about her subject. Far from creating a bias in her presentation, this passion for the subject brings refreshing vividness and clarity, and yet no one feels that his or her viewpoint has been given short shrift.

These two journalists are helping to document the emergence of the Transcendent Society.]]> Spirituality and Social Change http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=3 Thu, 6 Jul 2006 18:45:30 -0400 Welcome to the Transcendent Society Weblog http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=2 The Prosperos, a school dedicated to revealing the true nature of man as consciousness. It was also the title of a series of lectures that Thane presented to the public in the late 60s and early 70s to explore the changes being wrought in public life by the enormous spiritual outburst that characterized the mid-century period.

In this space I will try to create a focal point, and a discussion point, to track current events and place them into the larger perspective of a planet that is in the throws of enormous transformation.


There is certainly no lack of emphasis on spirituality these days. With the spirit-driven Christians on one side and the proliferation of "new age" movements on the other it's hard to negotiate a middle ground. There's a lot of talk about spirit in both camps, and the definitions are equally vague in each. With important exceptions, of course.

One of the refreshing things about the changes in various Christian movements during the last three decades is that they are forthright in upholding a non-materialistic viewpoint in the face of a culture that puts more and more emphasis on materiality. They insist that there must be some guiding principle to life other then mere chance or the vagaries of power. They believe that people ought to take care of each other - God bless them - and "catch the spirit" while they're at it.

On the other hand, a great many of the groups take this liberating position and enclose it in a deterministic dogma that is little better than the materialistic cynicism they are fed up with. God may be spontaneous and free, but we humans are another matter entirely. There is a real divide seen between the divine and the human that continues a philosophical and theological view as old as Plato.

As for what has evolved into the "new age" movement, it might be compared to a metastasizing cancer. The explosion of what Marilyn Ferguson (in 1980 !) called "psychotechnologies" has hybridized by several orders of magnitude over the last 25 years into a jungle of methodologies that one enters with downright trepidation. A cursory exploration of Pathways magazine will illustrate the tower of babel quite eloquently. That's but one of several significant magazines that have developed to report on the industry. (A google search of the term "new age magazine" yields 156 million hits.) As with the Christian movements, new age initiatives of every stripe have become an enormous revenue generator.

The point, of course, is that anyone who can fill the hunger people have for spiritual understanding in some way can pretty much write his or her own ticket.

Such a complex phenomenon must be approached with care. There are a lot of factors to consider in the process of finding out how we got to where we are so that we can have a better idea of what is required of us today and into the future.

This statement reveals my secret - a dirty one by some lights : there is an intention to the universe and, by extension, to every life. We should be able get an inkling of what is demanded of us by looking closely at where we are and how we got here. You may as well know going in that this is where I'm coming from.

I look forward to your comments.

]]> Spirituality and Social Change http://thanelegacy.com/commentary/index.php?itemid=2 Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:04:12 -0400