Originally posted June 3, 2011

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What is it that we are striving to achieve as a nation, our Purpose on Earth?

What did Tom Paine expect of us, or George Washington?

If we do not know our purpose then no matter what good we may achieve on the face of the Earth, we will be rudderless inside. We won’t know where we’re going or how we want to get there. We will be guided by the plan du jour. Any good we do will be random, grasping at straws of tactical opportunity to head toward the seeming good at that moment – and we have seen how repeatedly in history who or what at first seems good turns out to be not as good as we thought.

What is worse, during a period when we have forgotten our purpose, the nation will be contributing little to the spiritual nourishment of its citizens. Yes, I said spiritual – a nation owes it to its citizens to create an environment where the citizenry finds it easy to slip into feelings greater than their individual selves, and can act on and become those feelings through and through. In the previous post I referred to that perhaps too vaguely as the “Facilitation of individual development” – I probably should have specified physical, intellectual, intuitional, emotional, perceptual, and spiritual development.

Despite separation of Church and State, and widely ranging opinions as to the spiritual details of the Founding Fathers’ notions of the nature of reality, no one can deny the spiritual resonance of the words that led to our nation’s birth.

Are these not spiritual words: Liberty, Equality, Justice. They evoke a state – albeit typically all too brief – where our emotional being is swept up into something larger than our personal self. In the current hyper culture this brief flash of inspiration might go by too fast for consciousness to notice it.

Those words used by the Founders are spiritual words. Words that refer to, and evoke, states of spiritual sensitivity – openness to the duty we owe others, owe the Universe, owe in fact to God, whatever you conceive Him to be. Ideals that many humans envy but consider pragmatically irrelevant in their actual moment-to-moment dog-eat-dog lives here in the hypersphere*.

Regardless of the efficacy of those words then or at times like WWII or today, even when a nation fails to nurture spiritual ideals as part of its heritage, in our moment to moment existence on Earth we must consider the measurable value of being a nation focused on spiritual ideals.

If we could be that inspired nation again – or if we are still that nation right now but not taking enough notice of it – then one way or another it is time to tap into that tide of human positive emotion that can energize creative thought and enable right action.

So let’s consider again – what is our true mission as a nation?

In the absence of creative thought and in the heat of trepidatious events, piling up one after the other without respite over decades, the country has accepted its present mantle of world cop – protecting the weak from aggressors.

What if that isn’t the main point of our existence?

It would be terrible to have accepted the role of world’s cop, and then fifty or a few hundred years later when the world has become a rational and emotionally positive society, a cop is no longer needed. Or the role that had been cop in mean times is ever sinking down to a kind of nudnik level, solicitously protecting people from themselves in pestering ways. America, the world’s nudnik?

We have the opportunity now to choose our own destiny. Let’s as a nation agree on what it is. And let’s start the dialogue, here and now. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Best to all, Bill

*Not in the sense of spheres in four or more dimensions, but in the sense of the Earth in Acceleritis™.

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