Sacred America, Sacred World

Installment #4

Introduction: Part Four

Cultural evolution is a slow and often meandering process with many opportunities to regress. Both Democratic and Republican political positions hold value; indeed, as I’ve passed through the challenges of starting and successfully growing my own company, I have deepened my appreciation of free enterprise and how important it is not to restrain America’s entrepreneurial engines.

I’ve seen how the discipline, caution, and personal responsibility championed by Republicans build character and a stronger business. I have joked that I’ve had to integrate my “inner Republican” to become a better CEO, recognizing that some of what I once judged holds value for creating a healthy, profitable, and responsible business.

On a larger scale, I’ve grown to see how the evolution of our country to the next level of our potential requires the best of all of us — Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians and Greens. Our task is thus not just about getting the “right” party elected or even finding the “right” leader but about evolving our political process itself so that it generates greater wisdom and reflects the best in us. We need real, long-term solutions, and they are found in all value systems and in all parties. As we learn to appreciate alternative positions, we can help grow a healthier political culture where opponents become allies and adversaries become friends.

So the book you are holding represents the fruits of my political journey, one that started off as more radically left wing and has evolved to appreciate and even integrate positions that I once judged as of the old guard. While I still believe in progressive ideals and the vision of the future they hold, I now see that to evolve America still further, conservative and traditional values are often required to keep things working well. There’s a positive evolutionary tension that progressive and conservative values create so that our movement forward is more measured, thoughtful, and grounded.

This complementarity is important to recognize and honor because it’s clear that our country and our world are going through a historic shift to what we can think of as the “operating system” that runs our lives. Just as our computers are periodically upgraded with new and more sophisticated operating systems, so too are we evolving a new global consciousness
and culture that will, in turn, transform every realm of human endeavor. We are evolving into one people on planet earth, and the walls between us are slowly but surely coming down in spite of the violence, tragedy, and discrimination that are still quite evident. And America must reflect that evolution as well by upgrading our own cultural codes in a thoughtful, balanced, and grounded way.

We are only in the beginning phases of this shift and there are many ways for us to go astray, from being dragged into a World War III to becoming more isolationist to failing to meet the challenge of global warming. However, I believe that the love, courage, and stories of commitment I witness every day can carry us forward and ultimately triumph over the forces of regression, polarization, and fear.

The evolution to a truly sacred America is not an idealistic, ungrounded dream. It’s an evolutionary imperative, forced by dozens of converging streams of crisis in the world, ranging from melting ice caps to emptying aquifers, from loose nukes to refugee crises, from drug wars to rogue terrorist states. The previous version of America has, in many ways, reached the limit of our capacity to produce lasting solutions to collective challenges. The world needs something more from us now, and we need something more noble from ourselves as well.

I will explore the next steps for us to become the kind of engaged, conscious, and committed citizens who can help America fulfill our country’s mission and uplevel our democracy. Stepping into that next level of citizenship will also take some real reflection on where we are part of the problem. As a white American, I often want to recoil from the legacy of racial hatred that has roiled streets from Ferguson to Baltimore. To complete this book with integrity, I needed to study African American pioneers and take racial injustice seriously. To walk the talk of transpartisanship, I worked to release my judgments of conservatives by doing things I previously would have found distasteful, such as reading both of Sarah Palin’s books during the 2008 election cycle and writing a public Huffington Post column about what I learned. I’ve made microloans to Islamic entrepreneurs, engaged in healing work with Indigenous peoples, and slept in an Occupy encampment. Writing this book over the last ten years has thus compelled me to expand the compass of my own heart as I call to my fellow Americans to do the same.

So that summarizes my journey that has led to the book that you hold in your hands. While I will weave some parts of my personal story and experiences into the rest of the book, Sacred America, Sacred World is ultimately a vision and strategic roadmap for the evolution of our country, offered with as much clarity and simplicity as I can muster. My intent is to honor the importance of each of us in forging our nation’s future, whether we identify as progressive or conservative, atheistic or religious, Indigenous or European, white or black, male or female, working class or wealthy. I aim to infuse that inclusive spirit in each sentence of this book.

In the pages that follow, I will explore four main areas that will be essential for America to fulfill our higher mission. In Part One, Developing a Sacred Worldview, we will look at the emergence of a more holistic and reverential way of seeing the world, one that is coded into our founding ideals as well as emergent as we enter a global era. I liken this to a new operating system and show how we are upgrading both our consciousness and our culture. In Part Two, I’ll address how we can become more whole as a people by healing the divides in our society, which are ultimately rooted in our consciousness. I end by recognizing that this is vital to “Occupy the 100 Percent” and enter into a new era without leaving anyone behind. In Part Three, Creating Innovative Solutions, I’ll look at how a sacred and transpartisan perspective can lead to powerful and effective policies that lead to stronger families, improved schools, peaceful communities, and a healthier economy, in addition to a sustainable world. I will share many exciting examples and breakthroughs here. In Part Four, Building an Evolutionary Movement, I’ll look at how to build an effective political movement for long-term change, going beyond left and right to address the deepest needs for evolving our country and world. I will share about exciting work under way to create unified campaigns and an infrastructure for the empowerment of conscious citizens. And I will culminate with an exploration of how we can evolve global democracy in a way that finally creates a world at peace.

While I cover a lot of ground, a book like this cannot be comprehensive or complete. My hope is that Sacred America, Sacred World will help awaken your dreams for our country and inspire you to take passionate action, for it is in the synergy of working together that something truly historic can be born.

To be continued in the next issue of Catalyst...

Click on the following to read: Installment #1   Installment #2   Installment #3