The 2012 American Presidential election is pivotal in deciding how our nation balances what is good about materialistic individualism with what is good about spiritual connectedness.
Biochemically Connected to God; Part 6
The supposition of post-racialism is that race is not important because we are all the same regardless of race. I believe we are all the same because we are human; but race and culture are among the things that make us different. Century upon century of racial-cultural history and racial experience make us not the same; and America benefits greatly from the difference.
Few of the post-racialist I talk with are African American, like me. Their argument seems to be: There is no difference between us; you are just as good as I am. In this they feel betray when I do not accept what they consider a compliment.
Sometimes I make the counter argument: No, I am in some ways better and in some ways not as good, if we are speaking about social position, legal standing, economic prospects not as good; but in ways of seeing the world that derive from our different racial-cultural history and racial experience, America is better because we are different!
The easiest thing for both black and white Americans I talk with to agree with me on are the ways that blacks stand in negative positions because of racism. The hardest things for both black and whites to grasp are the ways that American racial (even racist) history has created an added value for the nation and the world.
That the value-added argument is hard to make does not prevent it from being true. Here is my argument: Paradoxically, the North American slave trade brought from African culture to the center of Western Civilization people whose existence still reflected the ancient and lofty concept of the spiritual nature of reality; the concept is that we all have a direct entanglement with God, who acts through us, all around us, as us.
Paradoxically, racial segregation kept this concept alive while America became the chief defender of Western materialistic individualism. Materialistic individualism is the concept that each person is a separate entity, nothing more than the material (blood, flesh, bones, etc) out of which we are made; and God is separate from us, off somewhere in the sky and we pray to Him to “come down” and be with us.
The dominance of materialistic individualism arose out of what American political conservative Samuel Huntington called The Great Divergence, also known as the European Miracle. According to Wikipedia The Great Divergence is:
the process by which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations) . . .emerged irrefutably during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization of the time, eclipsing Qing China, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.
Conceiving of humans as separate from each other and the universe has contributed greatly to the material advancement of human life.
According to their own declarations no candidates for President and Vice President of the United States symbolize the strength of materialistic individualism more than do 2012 Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
One the other hand, President, Barack Obama, has interjected into our national political life the American urge to accept its African-ness, its blackness, which connotes the impulse to strengthen what we can call our spiritual connectedness.
Spiritual connectedness is the concept that we are enfolded in an intangible web of energy and therefore connected to each other and the entire universe, which is God, if we choose to call it that. Or we can now call it The Unified Field of Energy, as do quantum physicists.
Or we can call it the super-conscious mind as do integral psychologists, the divine source of all energy as do many Eastern religions, the Luminous Matrix as does Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum in Dark Light Consciousness. Bynum shows the science that proves a biochemical entanglement with God. This is what Jesus discerned spiritually --“The Kingdom of God is in you.”
Dark Light Consciousness is a symbolic representation of the human paradox: materialistic individualism (light consciousness) can be as destructive as it is life-enhancing. Just as conceiving of humans as spiritually connected to all humankind and the entire universe (dark consciousness) can be as life-enhancing as it is, in some instances, destructively inhibiting.
To my mind Obama represents The Great Convergence. He is neither African American nor European American, neither dark nor light, just as our nation is neither. He seems to have made internal peace with what I call The Racial Integration of the American Mind. He seems to have balanced what is good about materialistic individualism with what is good about spiritual connectedness.
That, to me, seems to be a super-liminal view of him. Add to his personal history the fact that he was born in Hawaii, the state in the nation where more than 74% of its population is of Asian origin, and we see that all three of the major racial divisions of the human species are in his make-up, just as they are in ours as a nation. Obama ‘R Us!
Growing up among Asians he has no doubt been touched by the nation’s and world’s great cultural reservoir of non-theistic religion, which is both more ecumenical and more compatible with the other aspect of the Great Convergence –the convergence between science and spirituality.
George Davis is author of the new spiritual spy novel, The Melting Points. Just published is the 40th Anniversary Edition of Coming Home, Davis’ novel upon which the Academy Award winning, Jane Fonda, Vietnam War film of the same name was based.