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A Former Monk Guides You on Your Personal Journey of the Spirit

"Joseph Dispenza and I have much in common. We know monastic life firsthand, and we know Christian theology. When we were very young, something stirred to turn us toward an unknown spiritual focus; though the forms shifted over the years, the path of seeking is intact.

"I admire many elements of his story, especially his willingness to pursue intuition in service of his unique spiritual destiny. He takes the spiritual life seriously and yet wears it lightly"

- From the Foreword by Thomas Moore

Dr. Hazel Parcells, the revered "grand dame of alternative medicine," healed herself of "terminal" tuberculosis in the 1930s, nursing herself back to full health by simply changing her diet. For the next half-century, until her death at 106, the tenacious Dr. Parcells embarked on an extraordinary career of original research into "kitchen chemistry," nature's remedies, and the underlying causes of the health problems of our time.

At once "radical" and very straightforward, Dr. Parcells's methods make use of the most simple and readily available ingredients: natural foods, household items, and good old-fashioned common sense. From bathing in a sea salt solution to purifying drinking water with full-spectrum light to soaking the toxins out of food (and our bodies) with bleach, Dr. Parcells's program works - with immediate and astonishing results.

Watch for my new Kindle book about Dr. Parcells - in her own words at age 106.

For two weeks, a cluster of mom-and-pop vendors in the Plaza Civica, a few blocks from our house, have been selling human skulls, fruit, bones, plates of food like tamales and enchiladas and chicken molé, and skeletons in coffins—all in pastel colors and made of sugar, and all no larger than the palm of your hand.

These are tokens of Day of the Dead, one of the most solemn and, paradoxically, one of the most cheerful fiestas on the Mexican calendar.

The candied food goes onto home altars; real food, tequila, Coca-Cola, candles, and armloads of orange marigolds and chamomile are taken to the family plot at the cemetery on la Dia de los Muertos. They are placed on gravestones with pictures of the departed, and everyone sits and reminisces about—and with—the dead person. All day, with candles blazing, children running around, and people quietly chatting and chuckling, the dead come alive again.

The pervasive religion of Mexico teaches that one lives a good life, and then one goes to heaven to be with God and the angels. But Day of the Dead is about the dead returning to earth and gathering with the living in the most inclusive and complete of family reunions.

The specific Christian feast is All Soul’s Day, November 2, directing the faithful to pray for the repose of those who have gone before us into eternity. Its sensibility, though, is pre-Christian, perhaps prehistoric. This is ritual rooted in a tradition that transcends religion, and goes to a kind of universal “earth spirituality.”

We can join in this most mysterious commemoration by internalizing its essence. In this way, Day of the Dead can become for us an occasion for reflecting not only on our own mortality, but on how we can “die” each day to the personal past of ourselves and be reborn into a new, higher sense of Self.

This year for Day of the Dead, I am considering building an altar not to a dead relative, but to myself—the part of me that has already died or needs to die. I am thinking about making an altar for all the dead dreams of the past and for the past itself.

On my own Day of the Dead altar, I will be placing a number of never-fulfilled aspirations, laying them at last to rest. In with the candy skulls and sugar-fruits are going those two manuscripts that never got published, the friendship that never was cultivated and finally died on the vine, the relationship of my early years that somehow never reached a proper closure. Among the photos of my mother and father and brother—all in heaven now—I will be setting the illusion of chatting in a TV studio with Oprah about my newest book, the fantasy of explaining the differences between religion and spirituality to Larry King, and the daydream of impressing Charlie Rose.

There with the candles and marigold petals and the shot-glass of tequila will be my musings about winning the lottery, touring the temples of India, going on a cruise to Alaska, seeing a Shakespeare play at the Old Vic in London, dining on the Orient Express en route from Paris to Istanbul, being recognized by Brad Pitt with a tight handshake and a big bear-hug, flying first-class to Rome.

Into the little sugar coffin I will set my dreams of slipping easily into a pair of size 32 Levi 501s and of swimming laps for 30 minutes without stopping to rest, and of growing two inches taller. Mingled in with the plates of imitation enchiladas I will be laying my regrets over past failures, my irritation over having to wear reading glasses, my frustration with the arrogance of literary agents, my depression over not having been asked to stand up in public and receive the applause of my peers for my obvious and stellar accomplishments, my sinking disappointment that my cousins, all the family I have left, do not stay in closer touch with me.

All these things I am releasing may yet come to pass in my life, but they haven’t happened up to now, and holding onto them in a kind of personal fantasy future only makes me feel sour and brittle. Letting go of them is liberating and, ironically, seems to open up the possibility of having newer, ever better things come flooding into my experience.

The wisdom of Day of the Dead is that all things—us included—have a season; when the season is over, the leaf needs to fall and the spent flower needs to dry up. But its additional wisdom is that the ‘dead’ flower contains a seed that also drops to the ground to become the glorious story of the next season.

And the miracle is that the seed will create not just another flower, but a whole bush of flowers. That is a future—not a fantasy—that we can count on.

Joseph Dispenza is a founder of LifePath in San Miguel de Allende. He is the author of several books, including God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, and is a Spiritual Counselor in private practice. joseph@lifepathretreats.com

Michael Jackson Died for Our Sins

Four years ago, almost to the day, a jury in the case of The People of the State of California v. Michael Joseph Jackson found the entertainer not guilty on all charges. The child sexual abuse trial, which opened a window onto Jackson’s alleged misadventures with prepubescent boys at his Neverland home, dominated the airwaves for several weeks, offering us endless installments of the Michael Jackson saga as it unfolded. His face was in our face.

Why did the media lavish so much time on the trial? Were those just slow news days? Were we going to find out something we did not already know about Jackson – something that might help us feed the hungry of the planet, say, or improve literacy rates in the developing world?

Or was it plain old morbid curiosity that kept Michael on our TV sets day and night for weeks? Americans have always been enthralled by the sight of the rich and famous crashing down from the heights: celebrities may be indispensable to our culture, but they are also inherently undemocratic.

Consider this: we might have been frittering away so much time wallowing in the Michael Jackson trial because, in some strange way, he was us. We may have recognized in him, our National Freak, many of the psychoses that defined our culture during that time.

Psychotic disorders in people include severe mental conditions characterized by extreme impairment in the ability to think clearly, respond emotionally, communicate effectively, understand reality, and behave appropriately. Psychotic symptoms include delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is a false, fixed, odd, or unusual belief firmly held by people suffering from psychoses. For instance, there are delusions of paranoia (others are plotting against them) and grandiose delusions (exaggerated ideas of one's importance or identity).

These descriptions fit Michael Jackson, surely. His version of “reality” did not seem to correspond with any reality we live in. His behavior – eccentric, to be charitable – followed upon his delusions. They appeared to issue from both paranoia and what the Jungians call “inflation,” or overstated self-importance. If Michael was not certifiably “mental,” he certainly acted the part.

Psychotic symptoms also may have been haunting our collective state of mind then. Our culture seemed to be stuck in a Neverland of its own – a place where we could avoid indefinitely the hard realities of adult responsibility. Were we not suffering from delusions of paranoia? If you had any doubts about it, you could find out the color that day’s fear alert from the Office of Homeland Security or listen to our media commentators describing possible terrorist plots and places. Were we not living under the influence of a most insidious and isolating ego-inflation? Recall how many times in one week you heard the grandiose boast that the United States is the world’s only superpower.

Looked at from outside our mainstream culture, our American character bore an uncanny resemblance to the thirteen-year-old males who both attracted and mirrored Michael’s own Peter Pan personality: willful, materialistic, obsessed with toys, reckless, using money to gain power over others, entitled, fascinated with firearms, disrespectful to the opposite gender but fixated on sex, superficial, refusing to grow up.

Add to all this our preoccupation with shallow entertainments – the Michael Jackson trial primary among them – and we had all the makings of a culture in psychosis.

We connected with the tribulations of Michael Jackson on a profound level. He was our culture’s icon – and its scapegoat. We not only identified with him enough to make him the poster-boy of our anguish and strutting, but unconsciously we may have believed that if we heaped all our transgressions of adult responsibilities on his back, we would be home free. If we watched him being crucified long enough, maybe we would be delivered of our sins.

It does not work that way, of course. Each of us needs to be responsible to the degree of impeccability — especially at this crazy time of gigantic shifts in our species self-identity. Lately, we seem to be waking up to the idea that we cannot continue doing all the nutty things we have been doing — overeating, overspending, over-warring, diverting and distracting ourselves, mindlessly consuming, plundering our environment, numbing ourselves with trite religions and empty philosophies. If we are ever to transform ourselves up to the next level in the human adventure, we will have to grow up. This is a time to get serious, to get ‘adult.’

Adulthood is a bitter pill for our culture to swallow. There are only few precedents for it — the Age of the Founding Fathers was one, the World War II generation, maybe, another. But we are far from the inspired times of the Bill of Rights or the moral struggle against the Nazis. And there were precious few role models for us to follow in those years. It is hard to name five people in our culture at that time who were leading the way for us to grow out of a bratty adolescence and start taking on true adult responsibilities in the world.

In the absence of a blueprint for growing up emotionally and spiritually, we had, at least, the negative example. Not just Michael Jackson, but also all the corporations that got away with murder, all the purveyors of entertainment that kept us in arrested development, all the government leaders who paralyzed us with fear to push their various agendas.

Maybe having Michael Jackson in our face so much at that time was a kind of wake-up call. Looked at that way, the King of Neverland might have been more than merely our scapegoat. As peculiar as the thought sounds, Michael might have been the savior we had been waiting for.

The creation myth of the old religions told us we were soiled, broken, flawed, defective, sinful, corrupt, damaged from birth, and in desperate need of redemption — and we believed it.
What if none of that was true?



Being Perfect Now

Whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and
paradisiacal beyond what our imagination can conceive.
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804)

About a year and a half ago, I realized I was happy. There were short periods when I felt a little less happy than usual, but those times were like clouds passing overhead on an otherwise bright, sunny day. My main state of being was happiness, contentment, satisfaction, and a feeling of serenity.

I had given up trying to improve myself.

Do an Internet search for “self-improvement” and the first ten of “about 7,600,000 sites” will come up. Comb through some of the sites and you will see that we are tying to improve ourselves in hundreds of areas of life. Physically, we are working out and dieting and self-medicating and Botoxing ourselves toward the ideal of Greek deities. Mentally, we are meditating and listening to philosophy lectures on CDs and sharpening our memory and figuring out puzzles to approach the intellectualism of an Einstein. In the emotional sphere, we are screaming in anger-releasing workshops and ferreting out with therapists the roots of our childhood traumas and taking “Emotional IQ tests.”

Even spiritually, we are tenaciously attached to improving ourselves, whether by joining the latest Eckhart Tolle book-reading circle or unraveling the mysteries of the Kabala or highlighting passages in the Bible or attending seminars on the Law of Attraction. Not only are we spending a great deal of time trying to better ourselves, we are also spending a great deal of money — around $11 billion this year, according to research from Marketdata.

All this self-improvement! It’s exhausting.

Unless I am missing something, I think it would be safe to say that we humans are the only species on the planet that seeks to improve itself. Some of the impetus for getting-better-all-the-time may be in our evolutionary hard-wiring: with self-awareness comes the notion that there is a future, and with that comes the further implication that we can be better, and therefore happier, tomorrow than we are today.

But I believe much of what motivates us to fix who and what we are derives from our “human story,” the tale we have repeated to ourselves down the ages about how we are fundamentally defective. The old sky-God religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — in particular, told us we were soiled, broken, flawed, faulty, sinful, corrupt, damaged from birth, and in desperate need of redemption — and we believed it.

Our dominant origin myth, the creation legend of more than half the human race, tells us that we were created in a beautiful garden, then “fell” by disobeying our Creator and were cast out of the garden. Since then, we have been striving to get back to paradise. But, paradoxically, whereas the Creator fashioned us out of the earth to live in the splendid garden of the earth, the paradise toward which we are aspiring is out of this world — somewhere in the sky above the clouds, the place where God lives.

This has always seemed to me to be a mixed metaphor of, well, Biblical proportions. When we were thrown out of the earthly garden, we began the long, arduous process to get back into God’s graces not in this lifetime and not here on earth, but after our physical death in an ethereal location called heaven.

Our religions have kept our eyes fixed on the skies. Earth, for these traditions, is synonymous with our lower nature, sin, and death. Our attention has been drawn away from the earth toward an imaginary heaven, ironically, full of earthly delights. In some Eastern religions, reincarnating back on earth is actually a punishment for having lived a selfish and immoral life.

Thinking that we were just passing through on this planet, it became for us merely a waiting-room for eternity. Call it a theology of escape pure and simple, encouraging us not to stay here and cultivate our superb garden home, but to renounce, suppress, and disdain it on our way to a better, more lasting place. To know why we humans have so thoughtlessly and maliciously mistreated this world’s fragile ecosystems, we would need to go no further than to see how we have understood the core beliefs behind our traditional religions.

Some, like our generation’s genius theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, have even told us that we need to leave this planet in order to preserve our species. Professor Hawking is not the first to suggest that we abandon our crippled earth. For many years, rumblings in the popular imagination have been pointing us toward discarding our planetary crib after soiling it beyond reclamation. In Mexico Mystique: the Coming Sixth World of Consciousness, Frank Waters asks the question, “Are we on this ecologically doomed planet psychologically making efforts to leave it? Is this the unconscious prompting, akin to the instinct of migrating birds — or rats deserting a sinking ship! — behind our rationally engineered landings on the moon and preparations to extend our space travel to Mars?”

* * *

I have always thought of the Garden of Eden not as a place we came from, but a place toward which we are going. With the dawn of dazzling new technology, we probably could leave our planetary home at some point in the near future, but should we? The challenge for us may be not how we are going to get out of here, but how we are going to stay. The correct decision for each of us on the brink of our species’ adulthood is to remain here and reclaim the planet, turning it into the garden that we have been imagining through the ages in other parts of our sacred texts.

We may need a new version of our creation myth. In it, we come from the mud of the earth but we stay in the garden and tend it. Choosing to stay here allows us to frame a new and more relevant spiritual story — one in which our personal spirituality springs from reverence for the planet.

Before God was a father in the sky, she was a mother in the earth. Riane Eisler, in her pioneering cultural history, The Chalice and the Blade, tells us that the first religions, if you can call them that, were simply ways of life with bodies of ritual connected to the earth, its movements through time and space, its amazing seasons, its miraculous fecundity. They were mother religions, honoring the earth itself as the divine source of life.

In this goddess-inspired world, Eisler says, the social pattern was one of partnership — between humans and nature, between women and men, between neighbors — rather than the one we have now, and have had at least since the time of the God of Abraham, the dominator pattern. Under the dominator model, there is a pyramidal hierarchy where the people at the top have more than the people below them have, and exert power over them.

If Riane Eisler’s partnership realm sounds like life in the Garden of Eden before the “fall,” it may be exactly that. The Neolithic or agrarian age (the Garden) lasted from approximately 8000 BC to roughly 2000 BC, when barbarians from the north and east descended gradually on the highly developed goddess civilizations in the Middle East. When they did, they brought with them the domination of men over women, and thus, in their religious expression, the domination of the sky father god over the earth mother goddess. We were sent on a cruel evolutionary detour during which we thought of ourselves as broken and corrupt, and crying out for fixing.

Now we are beginning to see that we are in essence the perfect creations of our Edenic mythology, ready to direct our own destiny. The great upward spiral of time is turning us back in the direction of the mother energy, bringing our attention again to the sacred soil under our feet.

At this critical time in the human story, we have the opportunity to rewrite the ending of our creation myth and re-imagine our human destiny. According to this telling of the tale, we are not cast outside the gates of paradise by a judging divinity’s avenging angel, but we are at home among the lush forests, waterfalls, mountains, and meadows of our earthly garden, and we walk with God in the cool of the evening.

In this reframing of our origins we really are the “little less than the angels” of our spiritual folklore, more bent on doing good to each other and ourselves than bad. We are not failed creations, after all, but works in progress evolving into the full expression of ourselves as a bud opens slowly into the fullness of a rose. The only redeeming we need is to remind ourselves of our perfection, already achieved by divine connection in the spiritual realm that is our true home.

* * *

While we may be laying to rest the illusion of our imperfection and the need for incessant improving, turning things around on earth will take considerable doing. For centuries we have been working from the assumption that everything under our feet is here for us to exploit. If we are going to commit to staying here, we will have to first come to a new awareness of our lush green globe as a living organism, truly the mother from which we sprung, deserving of a maternal respect. It is a spiritual awareness, taking us not to some far-off heaven beyond the stars, but back to the heaven of this planet, our divine mother, from whence we came. Like her, we are three-quarters water; our bodies are made up of the same minerals and other chemical elements as her body. We are the earth.

A great deal is at stake at this moment in history. We could be reaching the point of no return — the vision of Professor Hawking — when we will have no choice but to desert our home planet because, dying, it will no longer sustain us. How much better for us to begin now to take on the adult responsibility for making heaven right here on earth.

“If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously,” Dr. Jonas Salk tells us, “a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.”

There is still time to transform where we live now into the luxuriant garden of our collective human dreams — and ourselves into the new Adams and the new Eves. All that is required to create heaven on earth is for us to leave behind the false image of ourselves as “fallen” and understand that the place whereon we stand is already holy ground.

Recently, I spent a week alone and in silence at the Benedictine Monastery in Atotonilco, in the desert near San Miguel de Allende.

On my first day, I was met by the Extern monk at the monastery early in the morning (the Extern is the one monk who is appointed go-between for the monks and the outside world). He showed me my little room, which was down the hill from the monastery church, and gave me a bottle of water. From then on, I was on my own.

For a week my only time-commitments were meals, eaten in silence with the monks: 8:05 AM for breakfast, 1:25 PM for comida, and 6:45 PM for supper. The odd times for meals have to do with the singing of the Holy Hours, chants the monks perform several times during the day, beginning at four in the morning: the Hours are scheduled on the hour; when they are over, the monks eat — which explains the peculiar start-times. In monastic life, where there would seem to be practically nothing to do, ironically, every minute counts.

Silence is not new to me. A few weeks after I graduated from high school, I went away to a monastery and lived as a monk for eight years. The first year of my monastic life was lived in silence…the entire year.

What happens when one is silent for a long period? The outer noise goes first, and then the inner noise starts to evaporate. Soon, quiet reigns everywhere, it seems. Time slows to a crawl. Sound becomes a curiosity — natural sounds, especially, like the flow of water or the rustle and sway of tall grass, become occasions for deeper listening and lead to a most profound inner calm.

Deep within each of us there appears to be a great well of health, abundance, knowledge, guidance. When we enter the silence and stay in the silence, we have the opportunity to come into direct contact with that sacred well. In that place dwells our True and Higher Self: It is that part of us that exists and operates in a place where there is no time –– no past, no future, only the present moment. It is the part of us that is connected to all of consciousness. It holds the answers to all our questions, the solutions to all our problems.

During my week at the monastery in Atotonilco, the only activities I engaged in, beside meals, were walking around the property (which is huge), reading, journaling, and meditating. And resting. It seemed to be enough just being there and reveling in the solitude and quiet. I experienced a deep feeling of relaxation — a sense that every cell in my body and every circuit in my mind was in a blissful state of idle.

I also had the distinct feeling that my entire body and its emotional, mental, and spiritual envelopes were repairing and regenerating themselves. I knew I needed these rest periods from time to time. They are like the ‘rests’ in music, which give a song character and make it mean something.

Inner Easter

Easter is upon us again. In San Miguel, we are making ready for the most solemn, colorful, and passionate public rituals of the year.

Many years ago, when I was taking theology courses as part of my training to be a Roman Catholic monk, I encountered the curious rule for setting the annual date for the feast of Easter, called in the official liturgical calendar “The Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Unlike Christmas, which falls on 25 December every year in the Western Roman Church, Easter is what is termed “a movable feast” — that is, its date changes every year according to certain circumstances. In the case of Easter, those circumstances are cosmic.

When Easter occurs is so important to the Church’s liturgy that figuring out the date actually has a specific name in Latin — one that may sound suspiciously contemporary. The name is Computus. Since the early Middle Ages, Computus is the term used to determine the date of Easter, from which many other feasts and commemorations that precede it and follow it in turn take their scheduling.

For instance, once we know the date for Easter next year, we will be able to back-track through the weeks of Lent to find Ash Wednesday, and the day before that, Fat Tuesday (called so, of course, because one could get fat for the last time on that day before launching into the rigorous fasts of Lent).

The Computus rule, right out of the Church’s Canon Law is that Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March, which is nominally the day of the vernal equinox. Another way of saying it: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.

If a Christian feast being set in accordance with phases of the moon and equinoxes sounds vaguely like an ancient pagan earth-deity ritual, it is because it probably was in the beginning. What better time of year to mark the resurrection of the self than the moment the earth begins its journey back to life, taking all of nature with it? The idea of personal renewal at the start of spring no doubt goes back to the dawn of human consciousness.

Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, we all have the opportunity at this special time of the year to connect with the deeper mystery and stirring metaphor of resurrection. The tree that was just a dark tangle of bare branches all through winter is now sprouting new growth, obviously alive though it appeared dead for so many months. In the same way, if we get into the spirit of the season, we can renew ourselves by rededicating our efforts to be the highest expression of who we truly are.

Personal renewal is probably different for everyone depending on what one values in life. For me, there are several dimensions to the idea of rebirth — the first the reawakening of my physical self. I find that this is the time of year to revisit my New Year’s resolutions, particularly the ones about the health of my body, and redouble my efforts to get enough rest, engage in regular exercise, and eat healthy food.

Mental renewal can be about staying sharp and alert — avoiding TV or other numb-out mental “activities” — and conversing intelligently with others, trying to stay on-target and “on-message,” without wandering down verbal blind alleys. This is a good time to examine mental attitudes and beliefs, as well, to see whether they are still working in us in a positive way. Toxic, self-defeating self-concepts can be identified and striped away now, leaving room for the growth of new and better ways of regarding ourselves.

Spiritual renewal, in my mind, has to do with reconnecting in a meaningful way with the Source of life within us. Taking time during the week — during each day, really — to reflect on the truth that we are spiritual beings walking a human path (not the other way around) can bring us to a place of peace and serenity in all the other areas of life.

When Easter comes around every year, it is another opportunity for us to rise from the ashes of past and be reborn into a new and higher sense of self. Getting in touch with the archetype of resurrection and making it past of our own internal process, can bring a deep richness within to the awesome spectacle that is taking place right here in the streets of our special town.


Joseph Dispenza is a co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and the author of God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, and many other books.

This article, on the inevitable 'end of empire' all thinking people have been waiting for...the naming of it, not the concept, which has been on our minds for some time now...is brilliantly crafted. From this morning's Times of London. (bold-face is mine)

_____________________________________________________________________
Rusty superpower in need of careful driver

Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline
Matthew Parris

How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.

Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this "makes possible incredible change in the world".

The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. "Yes, we can" was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.

But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.

The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.

But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.

Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.

As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say "weren't" - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.

But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.

And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.

What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.

Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.

Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.

Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.

Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.

In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.

But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.

We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. "Yes we can!" was an easy sentiment to recommend. "No we can't," will be a far, far harder thing to say.

Getting Back to the Garden

The Obama Presidency Symbolizes the Recovery of the Youth Within — Reconnecting Us With the High Ideals and Aspirations of Our Youthful Selves.

We are stardust, we are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

For me, the seemingly eternal presidential campaign that ended with the election of Barack Obama turned on a single sting of images.

During the second debate between the two candidates in early October, the one with the ‘town-hall’ format moderated by Tom Brokaw, I found the body-language of the two men so compelling that at a certain point I turned off the sound on the TV and just watched them dance around the little arena surrounded by neat banks of well-dressed citizens. Obama was as sprightly and bright-eyed as a young spaniel. He stood straight and smiled disarmingly, and when he shifted his body position he glided easily from place to place.

McCain, on the other hand, his shoulders hunched up and his head bent, lurched around almost robotically. He seemed neck-less, stuffed into a too-small suit, a handicap that restricted his mobility and made his movements jerky. Over his tired eyes worry-lines waved like a fear-flag before disappearing into his thin white hair.

With the sound off, Obama appeared like a youthful Romeo; McCain a scheming, misshapen Richard III or worse, a furious Lear. I had made my own mind up months earlier, but this evening, I thought, not only clinched the election for Obama, but was what the election was really about. The next morning Tom Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post, observed telegraphically what could not have been missed on the millions watching that night: ‘Brokaw looked old. McCain looked old. Obama looked young.’

What has unfolded in the past few weeks and months is nothing less than the stuff of myth. The great changing of the guard in our culture — and it is now a world culture — signals a renewed hope in the future and the recovery of our own youthful high ideals and aspirations.

In the world of symbols, dreams, and archetypes, the exhausted husk of the old yielding to the fresh energy of the young is a natural and necessary occurrence. It is Saturn, the old king, fading into the background so that Jupiter, the new king, can reign: the king is dead — long live the king! It is the Death Card of the Tarot, which signifies the transformation from the old and useless to the new and useful. It is the archetype of the Destroyer, — Shiva, Angra Mainya, Cailech, and all the other gods of Darkness — laying waste the past in order to make room for the next thing.

If we are to have a new world, the old world must die. The only other option is to cling to that which we know — and sink with it like the victims of the Titanic (another apt symbol for the end of the old way of doing things and no accident that the story of the ‘unsinkable’ ship has resurfaced, to widespread popularity, in our time) into the sea.

We may think it a coincidence that Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died the day before the election, but in the land of myth this event fits perfectly with the archetypal pattern of passing the scepter. In dream language, the grandmother stands for all the ancestors back to the edge of time; when she dies, the hero, leading on the new generation, can at last live fully and express himself in the world.

Without knowing it (these things are always unconscious), the greatest compliment McCain gave Obama during the campaign was to call him inexperienced. McCain, as the symbol of the ‘experienced’ — the old and used-up — was uttering his own death sentence and writing his own epitaph.

* * * *

The great transformational drama playing itself out on the stage of our collective imagination has a special meaning and a particular poignancy for members of the Baby Boomer generation, my generation. I was surprised to find out a few years ago that the 78 million boomers in the United States are only a small part of the estimated 450 million Baby Boomers world-wide, mostly in the industrialized countries, which is to say, in the countries involved in the mid-century world war.

The name of the revolutionary epic at hand is the Recovery of the Youth Within, wherein we who were born in huge numbers all over the world between 1946 and 1964 identify ourselves with the youthful new president and pick up, as if returning to a bookmark in a treasured volume we never finished reading, the elevated ideals of our own youth.

Those aspirations, forged in the furnace of the 1960s, were wrought from the burning desire to be wholly realized persons, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The vision was an Aquarian dream of humankind as a vast interconnected tribe living in peace on a planet we had turned into a garden by our loving stewardship. It was about making ourselves and the world better, first by living personal lives of integrity, awareness, and depth, then by completing ourselves through service in the world: maturing to adulthood as a spiritual path.

The boomer generation grew up in a unique historical moment: at the end of World War II, when there was prosperity, a sense of expectation, and hope about the future. As the boomers came of age, they pushed every imaginable social hot button, expanding the universe of choices people have, from civil rights to women's rights to gay rights.

They became the most highly educated and wealthiest generation in history with a spending power of $2 trillion dollars a year. But they have spent far more than they have saved — much of it on themselves — part of a legendary self-indulgence that has a shadow side.

‘When you look at us, we're the most obese generation, the most drug-abusing — and we cause the most crime problems. We show the biggest increase in AIDS and new HIV infections,’ says University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males. ‘The conventional wisdom is that in our youth we were a wild generation — all kinds of partying, drugs, and political protest. And then when we got older, we settled down and became very austere and clean living. But that's not happened at all. We’ve actually gotten worse as we've aged,’ Males says.

What became of the spiritually imbued promise of our youth? We had imagined a world where there would be ‘harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding,’ in the words of Hair’s anthem, ‘Aquarius.’ While we have grown in years, we may not have matured emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Our entire generation appears to have gotten stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence of self-absorption, greed, materialism, and laziness.

Can Democratic primary voters have seen in Hilary Clinton and her blustering husband the embodiment of that narcissistic and self-indulgent side of the boomer character, and rejected it? If so, it may be the first sign that we were ready to awaken from the long spiritual slumber into which we had sunk.

* * * *

This is the vital importance to boomers of the Obama presidency: he is the symbol of our recovered youth, and the promise of a second chance to change ourselves and, by so doing, change the world. Whatever we may be expecting him to do now that he is president, in a way he has already served the metaphorical purpose of the moment: simply by being there, he has brought all of us to a place where we can reclaim the Youth within and rise from there to a spiritual adulthood.

Whether we actually will pick up the journey we began long ago, before we were detoured by the psychopathologies of our leaders, which were our own weaknesses magnified and projected, remains to be seen. On election night the CNN exit polls showed that boomers (Americans aged 45-64) voted 50% for Obama (the future) and 49% for McCain (the past), indicating that we may be ambivalent about or afraid to commit to the challenge of restoring our youthful ideals. Will we rise up to finish the humanitarian, world-healing work we envisioned or remain comfortably on the couch? This one may be too close to call.

But the tide of the times, led by a man who also represents the integration of our shadow (Obama is half-black, half-white), could be so compelling as to be irresistible. We might imagine a loud rush of wings from all quarters, led by boomers all over the planet rediscovering themselves in the presidential avatar — us, but young. George Eliot says, ‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’

Beginning the last third of our lives, we may at last be able to create the heaven on earth we imagined in our youth, when we had neither the resources nor the power to bring it about — by becoming fully realized, by becoming, finally, truly and in all ways adult.

If the election of Obama has taught us nothing else, it has brought home the clear and uplifting message, so woefully missing from the lexicons of recent occupants of the office: We can be better. We can make the world better. Yes we can.



Joseph Dispenza is the co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and the author of several books, including God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is a Spiritual Counselor in private practice. joseph@lifepathretreats.com