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Pathwork-informed Patriotism

I notice something new when I hang my American flag on my front balcony this year. The action is something I’ve done many times across many years, so it’s interesting to see it revealed now. Perhaps it is the extra special nature of this year—and this summer in particular—that brings it out. The 250th birthday of America (indeed, of modern democracy) on July 4th is coincident with several weeks of the World Cup. Lots of flags, colorful uniforms, smiling faces, patriotic songs, and plenty of merchandise and advertising at every turn.


Another kind of flag hangs on my balcony year-round—a string of Tibetan prayer flags—humbly frayed, unapologetically irregular, hand-cut blocks of bright red, yellow, blue, green, and white. This year, as the Stars and Stripes resumes its place as the balcony’s holiday visitor, I notice the prayer flags flapping in the breeze alongside, as though in conversation with it.


The prayer flags are a symbol of my spirituality and they embody many important aspects of my view of the world. As the little leaflet that came with the flags states, “These are used to bless the surrounding countryside for Peace, Prosperity, Purification, Compassion, Success, Knowledge & Longlife of all sentient beings.” As the flags flap in the breeze, the wind carries their prayers to where they are needed. For me, the flags further represent the Pathwork worldview because my first set was given to me by a beloved Pathwork helper who had returned from a meditation treat in Nepal, many years ago. And, these flags today are the colors of the hallowed ground of the former Pathwork center at Phoenicia that now serves as the Tibetan Buddhist retreat center called Menla.

My American flag, in contrast, is perfectly-shaped and tightly-stitched. The hem that waves in the breeze has five rows of stitching to keep it from fraying. As I know from my time in the military, to display a tattered flag is a disgrace and is forbidden in the U.S. Flag Code. The American flag is a simultaneously famous and infamous symbol, loaded with all manner of meanings in much the way the word “God” is. (Is the oft-used phrase “God bless America” a sincere, unifying prayer, or is it an egotistical, exclusionary one?) Maybe those multiplicities and dualities are the very proof of its power and consequence.


On this July 4, as the Tibetan Prayer flags flutter their threadbare edges in welcome to Old Glory, I notice this contrast tickling my own insides. In expressing myself through the flags I chose to hang, I have managed to create a larger, more meaningful symbol—a symbol of what the Pathwork is all about: non-duality, reconciling opposites, and transcending opposites to find a larger truth.


For sure, I am an individual with my uniqueness—an American veteran, a minority woman; grateful to this country for conferring the freedom of thought and the measure of wealth and leisure that enables me to study and teach Pathwork. I also have a quirky pride in the peculiar way of knowing exactly how to hang and fold a U.S. flag, and smug in knowing all sorts of things people do wrong when they think they’re saluting it properly. I both smile and grimace at myself to think that my impeccably-creased military ISI (Idealized Self Image) may never completely be ironed out of me. Similarly, my manifestation of the negative pleasure principle—of my life force having been channeled in this particular way of feeling motivated and safe only with a big authority in charge (like the U.S. government and U.S. corporations I’ve worked for)—may be with me for many more years…or lifetimes. In this way, the flag and the emotions it stirs in me have given me pause to reflect on the landscape of my deeply personal inner work—of my soul’s journey.


I am equally sure—as the Guide teaches in perhaps my favorite lecture—I am something larger and grander than even my soul’s journey across lifetimes. I am intimately engaged in The Great Transition in Human Development! This is a collective, planetary shift on the grand scale of the planetary soul’s journey. It has been building momentum—exponentially so in recent times. The planet as a collective is shifting from ego consciousness to love consciousness, and within that shift each country is a sub-collective engaged in its own unique version of that shift. As an American, when I think of patriotism nowadays, I think about America not as a nation or people per se but as an evolution—as a movement from where it came to where it’s headed. Just as a person can engage in Pathwork process to purify distorted consciousness and transform negative energies, so too can a country be engaged in the quest to be more of its Real (Divine) Self.


I have come to understand this collective quest for the Real and Divine Self to be the heart of true patriotism. The American Declaration of Independence (with its most famous phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,”) was a breakthrough in its time for its unprecedented assertions of human equality and dignity, personal sovereignty, freedom of expression, and other specific freedoms. I believe these qualities are no less than America’s collective Divine Self.


Of course, it is not as though America created new truths of human equality, dignity, and sovereignty in the year 1776. The Guide reminds:


“There is neither old nor new. Everything already exists and always has existed and will always exist. What is new on earth is that a certain aspect of ultimate reality ‘vibrates through’ into the world of matter…. We are of course dealing with concepts, abstract ideas, values, verities, laws, and so on…. All true values of whatever nature must have been, at one point in time, breakthroughs from the world of spirit.” And, “Once a cosmic reality has been discovered and is being expressed in human life, those who experience the inevitable beauty, goodness, and rightness of it logically attempt to continue this expression.”


To frame this for today: What happened in America around 1776 was an extraordinary breakthrough from the world of spirit! It is natural and right to remember, honor, and keep alive this breakthrough. This, to me, is what it truly means to be a patriotic American.


[Because I view patriotism—especially as concerns observances such as Independence Day—as a kind of tradition, I find the Tradition lecture extremely insightful on this topic. Where excerpts are offered below, I have substituted the word “tradition” with the word “patriotism”.]


In the wonderful Tradition lecture, we further have instructions on how to keep the breakthrough alive: We must “feel and inwardly experience the particular truth in question…. A continuous reexperience of the breakthrough from inner worlds of other realities, a dynamic aliveness…. Aliveness always means a thinking process, a sensefuleness.”


At the same time, we must avoid distorting these truths. Patriotism, when distorted, means “a dead weight, a dead and meaningless carry-over. Its true meaning has been forgotten, disregarded, mechanically repeated…. Its reality has become flattened or even totally obliterated.” It becomes “a process of death rather than life….”


Therefore, our patriotic calling is to dance harmoniously between unchanging truths and the forever changing expression of them. “Without continuous change, alive, unchanging verities cannot be lived. True patriotism must therefore always be coupled with change…. Those who follow patriotism blindly and meaninglessly create extremes of orthodoxies…. It creates a heaviness and resistance to change. It springs from the misunderstood message of the soul to preserve truths, beauty, values that were given in the past as a result of the soul’s struggle to find divine meaning and solutions.”


Back to the Declaration of Independence: It was written by misogynists and racists. Few of us today are going to dispute that. It took an exponentially bloodier war 75 years later for the country collectively to figure out one thing so rudimentary about freedom (i.e. that slavery is its opposite). By the same token, collectively, we are no longer blind to such hypocrisies in the way we were only decades ago. 21st century understanding has evolved to view the Declaration as an aspirational document. In watching some of this year’s documentaries such as Ken Burns’ The American Revolution and Netflix’s The American Experiment, I found myself pleasantly surprised at the mainstream depth and acceptance of the “aspirational document” interpretation. The “aspirational” part is America’s Divine Self that I mentioned earlier, seeking expression. It remains a core around which national unity may legitimately be found. The Declaration’s imperfect authors were still legitimately—in Pathwork we can say divinely—inspired by ideas that were daring, revolutionary, and life-threatening. These ideas were life-threatening not only to individuals such as the Sons of Liberty and the farmers-turned-soldiers at Lexington ; they were also life-threatening to the egos of King George III, British Parliamentarians, the wealthy ruling class, and slaveholders. On an even broader scale, these ideas were life-threatening to millennia-spanning worldviews about power, government, human rights, and even God himself (e.g. the divine right of kings). In this way, the events of the American Revolution can be seen as a pivotal chapter in the global Great Transition in Human Development.


Because this is Pathwork, I have to ask… How would you describe your relationship to your home country, and to patriotism? Think, for example, of how you react to your country’s flag, how and whether you would salute or address your country’s leader, how you honor (or ignore) certain national holidays and observances, what you wear in order to feel united with your group, etc. As usual, the Guide has some good questions and advice to help you deepen into your own truth with this topic:

• Can you see ways in which you are blindly patriotic, or blindly in rebellion to patriotism?

• Do you take every specific patriotic tradition/idea as it becomes an issue in life and examine it intelligently and self-honestly?

• Is there a personal stake why this or that patriotic tradition/idea is maintained or rejected?

• Does living this patriotic tradition make sense now in your life -- how and why?


"When life's issues are examined in that way, you will attain this most wonderful flow in which you can have patriotism in the most meaningful way and make it new. Yet you will never oppose its discontinuation if it was superseded by more meaningful truths, values, celebrations, customs, or acts. You will live in this combination of being in the now because you value what deserves to be valued from the past but can also let go of it and thus create a new future."


One of my duties in military days was to know that on national holidays the holiday-sized (extra huge) American flag must be displayed. I can still recite all the national holidays in order. It is interesting to think of this list and how our collective understanding of each holiday has changed. In my lifetime, we have added Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth (and what they say about freedom) to the list. Columbus Day and Labor Day? For better or worse, Americans don’t honor these days anymore though technically they exist. Columbus—his breakthrough of enlarging the West’s understanding of the world has since been overshadowed by collective recognition of the unrestrained Lower Self (genocide, imperialism, greed, extraction) that came with it. It is a now a day that comes with shame, whether conscious or not. Labor—The American labor movement is scattered and more poorly organized against exploitation now than it has ever been in my lifetime. Labor Day is a day when I mourn. Others might go buy a refrigerator…or an iPhone.


These national days continue to evolve in their collective meaning. What will they look like in the future? As a Pathworker, I know the Great Transition is already in effect, that ultimately human evolution strives away from ego separation to divine union. I imagine the day when even sacred Memorial Day and Veterans Day will seem as strange and anachronistic as Columbus Day seems to us now. War will have disappeared for such a long time that death and valor no longer need remembering. Until then, I will hang my flags and salute.


References:

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution

Netflix’s The American Experiment: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/the-american-experiment


This essay originally resides on JaniceYasui.com.

 
 
 

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