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
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
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