Marilyn Ferguson

As we shall see, there have always been two "bodies" of the American dream. One, the dream of tangibles, focuses on material well-being and practical, everyday freedoms. The other, like an etheric body extending from the material dream, seeks psychological liberation—a goal at once more essential and more elusive. The proponents of the latter dream have nearly always come from the comfortable social classes. Having achieved the first measure of freedom, they hunger for the second.

The more significant the question, the less likely there will be an unequivocal answer.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig described the risk of pressing reason to its furthest reaches, where it turns back on itself. "In the high country of the mind," he observed, "one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of the questions asked"

Another discovery: We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. Giving them freedom, we free ourselves. And they are free to grow in their own way.

Recall the model of the paradigm shift introduced by Thomas Kuhn: Every important new idea in science sounds strange at first. As the physicist Niels Bohr put it, great innovations inevitably appear muddled, confusing, and incomplete, only half-understood even by their discoverers, and a mystery to everyone else. There is no hope, Bohr said, for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance.

Conflict, pain, tension, fear, paradox... these are transformations trying to happen. Once we confront them, the transformative process begins.

"He had won the victory over himself," says the concluding line of George Orwell's grim novel, 1984. "He loved Big Brother." Just as hostages sometimes become fond of their abductors, we become attached to the factors that imprison us: our habits, customs, the expectations of others, rules, schedules, the state. Why do we give away our power or never claim it at all? Perhaps so that we can avoid decisions and responsibility. We are seduced by pain-avoidance, conflict avoidance.

Half a century ago in Holism and Evolution Jan Smuts tried to synthesize Darwin's evolutionary theory, Einstein's physics, and his own insights to account for the evolution of mind as well as matter. Wholeness, Smuts said, is a fundamental characteristic of the universe—the product of nature's drive to synthesize.

Another discovery: uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the moment, which may pass, but oceanic uncertainty, mystery that washes across our beaches forever.

"The new person creates the new collectivity," said political scientist Melvin Gurtov, "and the new collectivity creates—is— the new politics." The changing political paradigm concedes that you cannot sort out the individual from the society, nor can you separate "politics" from the people who engage in it. The person and society are yoked, like mind and body. Arguing which is more important is like debating whether oxygen or hydrogen is the more essential property of water. Yet the debate has raged on for centuries.

Not realizing that our species evolved in cooperation, we have opted for competition in work, school, relationships. Not understanding the body's ability to reorganize its internal processes, we have drugged and doctored ourselves into bizarre side effects.

Whose American dream? The dream is a chameleon; it has changed again and again. For the first immigrants, America was a continent to explore and exploit, a haven for the unwanted and the dissenters—a new beginning. Gradually the dream became an ascetic and idealized image of democracy, bespeaking the age-old hope for justice and selfgovernance. All too quickly, that dream metamorphosed into an expansionist, materialist, nationalist, and even imperialist vision of wealth and domination—paternalism, Manifest Destiny. Yet even then, there was a competing Transcendentalist vision: excellence, spiritual riches, the unfolding of the latent gifts of the individual.