| |
Read Part
1 | Part
2
My yearning for some type of a spiritual life and
the sense of belonging to something greater than
my personal world followed me through my childhood
and grew even stronger in my adolescence.
Around the same time that God was declared dead
by Time Magazine, I began listening to the music
of the Beatles. I was influenced so much that I
actually learned to play guitar and formed a band.
I started to take an interest in the world around
me, especially the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam
War movements. I identified with what the hippies
stood for even before I knew what it was. Something
about the hippie movement, the style of dress and
music and books had thrilled me when I was younger.
By the time I left High School for College I had
done more than admire the hippies. I had wholeheartedly
become one. Did I embrace the ideology of the movement?
Yes. And I did something about it: when I was drafted
I made a commitment not to fight, applied for and
received a Conscientious Objector Status.
The phenomenon of the hippies can be understood
only in light of the generations that preceded and
raised them. My parents’ beliefs had been
formed in a time of scarcity and fear, where ours
had emerged in a time when America was more prosperous
and secure. My parents came of age in the era of
the World Wars and the great depression. My Dad,
of Italian descent, born here in the USA, along
with his 2 sisters and 4 brothers, struggled through
the years of the depression. He enlisted and fought
bravely in Europe during World War 2. When stationed
in Italy, he met my mother. She was a part of the
Italian resistance. Born and raised in Bologna Italy,
saw first hand the destruction the wars imposed
on her country.
My generation, the byproduct of an affluent society,
had the luxury to question the strict boundaries
that our parents had blindly followed for generations,
boundaries whose original meaning had been lost
in time.
Their love of order and hygiene and tidiness, their
sacrificial attitude toward their own emotional
needs, their prudent ways with money and their respect
for material things were in direct response to what
they had not had. We, on the other hand, at least
those of us in the glory days of the great American
middle class, felt confined by the structures put
in place by our parents. We wanted spiritual expansion,
and sought it through new forms of music, dress,
drugs, politics, relationships, and life-style.
Everything that was constructed by generations of
following blindly age-old ideologies was up for
grabs.
For a while, my passionate desire to be “part
of the solution” was temporarily satiated
by my wish to see an unjust war ended. Of course,
I was fueled by the typical longings of an eighteen
year old and I found plenty of opportunities to
participate in the general unraveling of an established
order. Those were the days when sexual freedom and
drug experimentation were explored with a naiveté
that seems inconceivable today. Yet to us children
of mostly middle-class, twentieth-century America,
free expression took precedence over conventional
mores.
But then came the draft lottery. As those who did
not have to worry about the draft started to drop
from the ranks of the movement, I started to realize
that many were involved in this more for a sense
of identity than for the cause itself. This woke
something up within me, something that had been
bothering me all those years. I started to see the
mean-spirited rhetoric that pervaded much of the
counter-culture movement. Now the hypocrisy of hatred
within some of the peace and freedom groups began
to gnaw at my conscience. How were we going to heal
the wounds of the country if our own rancor was
only intensifying, if we became the oppressor instead
of the oppressed?
These questions echoed in everything I heard and
saw. In the music world the drug of choice was no
longer marijuana, but cocaine, even heroin. The
black leather jackets of the Hell’s Angels
had replaced the raggle-taggle, tie-dyed clothes
of the hippies. The strident resentment toward men
and “nonliberated” sisters within the
women’s movement started to take precedence
over a quest for liberation. The great heroes of
non-violence—Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi—were
dead, their message of tolerance and love no longer
the unifying element of the movement. American involvement
in the Vietnam War was about to be over, and the
issues, never as simple as we had assumed, were
even less clear-cut now.
I rode the wave to the shore and then watched people
scatter in different directions. Some of my friends
began to pay more attention to the direction of
their own lives. Some involved themselves more seriously
with politics and social action, seeing that as
an avenue for change; others dropped out of school,
moved to another country, or to a farm, or went
down the dark path of heavy drug use. I looked for
something that was missing in my life, something
that was to come in the mid 70’s.
In my disillusionment I started to read more on
the metaphysical subjects. Learn more about Astrology,
numerology and Dream interpretation. Started delving
into other religions and their histories. I began
a long search for spiritual wholeness. My sense
of alienation within my own religious ideologies
reawakened my childhood hunger for a relevant spiritual
path and a sense of some kind of communion with
others. I started to reconnect my childhood forays
into Catholicism, when I wanted to be a priest and
all those times I went to church with my best friend’s
family.
I was eventually led to Zen Buddhism and then to
other Eastern religious traditions and even Satanism.
We were riding the dying wave of the sixties, about
to hit the shore with a painful thud.
At this time a fascination with Eastern philosophies
had been growing steadily in America since the late
eighteenth century, when different Eastern texts,
including the Great Hindu masterpiece, the Bhagavad-Gita,
were first translated into English. Eastern thinking
profoundly influenced the transcendentalists in
the nineteenth century.
In 1893 the first World Parliament of Religions
was convened in Chicago, bringing together noted
religious leaders and theologians from around the
globe. Many of these leaders, in particular Soyen
Shaku, a Zen Buddhist, and Vivekananda, a student
of the
Hindu saint Ramakrishna, would have a lasting effect
on American spirituality.
Around the turn of the century, with the advent
of easier communication and travel, ideas from around
the world began to permeate American thought. This
melting pot of different cultures also provided
an atmosphere of connection of different cultures
religions and ideologies. Psychotherapy found its
way from Europe. New Thought, a religious movement
that began in the United States at the dawn of the
twentieth century, drew on a variety of sources,
including ancient Christianity, Hinduism, Transcendentalism,
and the thinking of the American philosopher and
psychologist William James. Movements such as Christian
Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, and theosophy,
founded by Helena Blavatsky, were born in these
fertile times. The work of these spiritual pioneers,
and of their students, set the stage for the wave
of Eastern philosophies and practices that rolled
into America in the 1970s.
So by looking at these major stepping stones and
what is occurring now in current religious trends,
I find that my perceptions of God, and the myths
and legends that surround each theology, are like
the pieces of a puzzle.
I tried to piece together a connection between our
spiritual and our physical nature. I tried to bring
in my own personal beliefs and those of current
concepts in hopes that I could make some kind of
connection to a clearer concept of God, ourselves
and the relationship to the physical universe.
I tried and am still trying to look at every aspect
of our religions, their histories and how much the
stagnation has had on our social structure. I firmly
believe that if we do not close the gap between
Science and Religion we cannot move forward. I do
feel we must connect with the mystical, with our
souls and get back onto the spiritual path.
I know how easy it is to use the spiritual teachings
to bypass the emotional ups and downs so natural
to family and community growth. In my own life,
self-judgment and the effort to rid myself of “ego”,
which served me well in my attempts at saintliness,
turned into an unforgiving attitude toward others
and myself when I woke up to the fact that I didn’t
want to be a saint. Likewise, years of unconscious
neglect of my body left me ignorant of how to heal
and nurture it when at some point youthful luck
gave way to health problems. In the narrow definition
of spirituality that we had adopted, there was little
room for other forms of self-discovery, ones that
would have rounded us out and made us whole.
|
|
