Letters I-VII, Mr. Jefferson Returns: American Mentor and Prophet
Letter I
The Soul of America is at risk. It is July 4th, 2007. I am Thomas Jefferson returned. I have come back for service to my beloved America. She is sorely in need of new vision, of a new beginning.
Dear Americans, I return to you in the voice and ideals of your tomorrow. I am sure you would take more comfort if my language were all pure colonial Virginian. That, however, is not at all my point or purpose in rejoining you. Better for you that I be the visionary calling to your natural dignity and destiny from your future and using such language common to you now that may lift and heal the soul of America. Yours is the moment, the turning point, or as you would say, the tipping point, of all human history since its ancient origins in Africa.
Americans have now a reckoning with human destiny. So I will speak to you in the words of now for the terms of your destiny.
For yours are the first few generations whose guardianship of all nature is a matter of your life or death down through all eternity. You may recall that I wrote that the dead authors of any document had no earthly right to bind up the lives of the living to their conceits. Rather every nineteen years each new generation is free and responsible to reconstitute its place in the world and of a right must do so.
Never in the course of human events has a moment occurred when America’s redefinition of purpose and intent been more critical in cosmic dimensions. For you are the first humans ever to see the faint but emerging image of your own eternal extinction in the mirror of planetary nature.
Accordingly, I have come back among you to bring you the vision of your own natural maturation. In every human born is the potential for the parent, the mentor, the sage and the transcendent being, all stages of maturation now vital for your survival. I am now with you in all those roles so that you will express those capabilities as gifts your planet must have for the improving and enduring health of the whole family of life.
I suggest to you that you will have to develop a totally new political economy beyond democracy and capitalism in order to save life on earth. As with the work of the founding of the blessed experiment in self-governance, America, you will all become as we were then, social architects. Your artistry will become legendary down through the ages for you will have created a planetary renaissance on purpose in less than a decade. It is my current duty to help you find the design specifications for that emerging golden age of human transformation and transcendence.
Divine grace, sometimes called the wisdom of the universe is, of course, love. The revelation of natural order is also always the discovery of love.
I have found from those among you the general systems science theory of transformative growth and change throughout all of nature. This revealed natural order makes clear that the tyrannical autocracy of King George the Third and his English aristocracy had to transform into American democracy, the power of the people. In the next progressive stage, the power of “We The People” will transform in your time into the power of all life on Earth. Soon thereafter, human political economy will transform again into the power of love.
By way of a brief farewell from this our first encounter, I offer you these few notes toward your emerging declarations of interdependence with all life:
A Declaration of Interdependence
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for all people to separate from the cosmology which binds them and enter into a new cosmological understanding of the universe more primal in truth and fulfilling of their rights and needs, a common courtesy for all life requires that they state the reasons and causes that drive their separation and the discoveries that impel their maturation into new being.
We the people of Earth hold these truths to be self-evident: All is created equal, sentient and sacred in love.
All being is endowed by its source in love with certain original rights.
Among these rights are conservation of being, creation of entropy for work, manifestation of symmetry for order and transformation by evolution for fulfillment.
These rights and principles of cosmic origin guide the people to institute new forms of self-governance based on new political economy in resonance with and reverence for the working of love in the universe.
Governments are instituted by people for people and of people with their creative engagement for the continuous care and fulfillment of all being.
When governments fail in these sacred duties of compassion, it is the right and the necessity of the people that they change their governments to bring them forward into harmony with the honest order of love.
In these notes, I have echoed my original declaration of independence to illustrate how radically different your present and future times are in comparison to ours at the birth of the American nation.
Letter II
I remember the birth of our first child and those who followed. There always is in the life of an unaware parent at the first newborn such an instant awakening and maturing into a new state of ceaseless caring love, as if all life itself had grabbed you into endless, exhausting, illuminating, fulfilling servitude. Other than the moment of your own birth and your own death, there is no such powerful moment as the arrival of your newborns. If you were life herself from all eternity, that moment of birth and parental maturation would be your principal purpose.
So when humanity as a whole being comes to that moment of awareness that all life on Earth is suddenly newborn, humans so quickly mature into ceaselessly compassionate parents of all life on Earth as to cause of themselves a change so monumental as to begin again a new calendar of creation.
Such a moment was the birth of the new millennium. Such a moment is the era of planetary renaissance now born of human transcendence. The inevitability of human maturation is as certain as that the mighty oak springs from the tiny acorn. The holy cosmos would have it no other wise, no other way.
Letter III
Nature is the architecture of love. This was so before the birth of your universe. It was love that slowed to descend into light which light remained to become matter which evolved to become you. So you are literally made of the love which descended and imploded to become the cosmos which word means order. Therefore, love is the order and intention and substance of all life. Now we are awakening to that reality.
It was always America’s role in universal destiny to be the bringers of that light and that meaning. So the timing has now become right for Americans to be the source, the substance and the future of being love with all being.
Such being is not some distant form of holiness. It is a present form of practicality necessary for survival. Ideal behavior enacted in every snowflake, seashell, spider and star is Nature’s ultimate form of practicality. That ancient truth from which our bodies are made is now coming home to the American body politic, and not a moment too soon.
I say again, America, and the word America, means love.
Letter IV
Over the years, I have taken some deep satisfaction that the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been understood worldwide as a definition of the great American experiment in self-government and as a call to the people of the world to free themselves wherever they are as a first step toward their own personal fulfillment.
So it is disappointing to me, nay, horrifying, that Americans today are more embroiled in the purveying of death than the glorification of life; more enslaved to war and oil and money than liberating themselves and the world’s people to seek out their own soul’s potential; more ensnared in fear of terrorism and fear of their own American government’s enactment of torture and secret imprisonment; more worried about the potential outcome for their own citizens’ brave and outspoken leadership than inspired and engaged in the pursuit of happiness.
It seems that America has been swept up in a regression of meaning toward a culture of fear and marched toward a destruction of the values of freedom on which the country was founded, values on which the world has come to depend.
That apparent regression and destruction signals a mortal wounding of the American soul. I write to the world’s people by writing to you Americans to remind you all that human well-being out into the distant future is now dependent on your mutual and all-encompassing embrace of all life on earth, all liberty on earth and all happiness on earth.
That I suffered mightily through merciless editing of my original draft of the Declaration of Independence was no pain at all compared to my present pain at the prospect of losing our noble experiment in self-governance and the liberty of human fulfillment to the forces of self-serving, material acquisition and self- denigrating timidity of spirit running rampant today.
Letter V
America! I say again your soul is at risk. Fear is no foundation for goodness. Arrogant oppressive empire is no foundation for goodness. Greed is no foundation for goodness. Yet, the American soul is mired in these things.
They are curable. But what do you do with a growing history now out in the open of premeditated preemptive war, war by choice. What does a soul do having committed such war falsely claiming self-defense? What does this soul now do for itself for atonement?
This is the American spiritual question of this political moment. Premeditated murder committed by any single citizen is the highest, the most heinous crime in the structure of civil law. What does a nation do awakening to the shame and guilt of such an atrocity of statehood committed in its name?
When the American soul finally awakened to the crime of slavery, it struggled through war to freedom climbing over the corpses of more soldiers lost than in all American wars combined. I was not man enough nor morally mature enough in my lifetime to fully face that primal challenge to life to liberty or to the pursuit of happiness and free my slaves.
Now the American soul faces a more primal challenge than ever in human history, for America is enslaved to war.
War, like slavery before it and still, is a human social invention, not an integral characteristic of human being like brain, bone, blood, psyche and soul. As such, war is a cultural artifice and political strategy inevitably bound for obsolescence as are the diapers of infancy left behind by the more mature child capable of conscious control.
There comes a day when war becomes so obviously dysfunctional and destructive of its own presumed purposes that the perpetrators of war find new behavior more beneficial to their true needs. That day has come to America. Yet it will take more courage to admit it and to mature beyond war than to wage it. This challenge of American courage and character to renounce war and to invent planetary social harmony is the most critical issue of this moment of searching political decision.
It will be seen from the American future that the sacrifices and the valiance of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan achieved the most noble of all victories in the over 230-year American Revolution when they were able with their deaths and wounds and endured horror to bring to the American people, finally, the war to end all wars.
That is the victory, the only worthy atonement for premeditated war committed in your name.
Letter VI
Americans!
You are now slaves to war, put there into ceaseless servitude by less than a dozen men.
How could this be so?
How could this possibly befall a free people? Or had you slept away your freedom?
You seem to be totally powerless in the face of your supposedly elected representatives to free yourselves from any calamity – spiritual or natural. You can organize vast road systems and communication systems. Have you lost your eternal common system the human soul amid the buzzing business of your supposedly beneficent marketplace?
Where are you, Americans?
The world needs you to awaken again. Your most powerful and important political tool is your local living community. It is the only communal vessel where you can make your personal and collective intelligence strong enough and wise enough to start turning the new rudderless terrifying ships of state toward their only safe harbors of human wisdom and compassion.
Your voice is a whisper in a windstorm of confusion until you join it with your neighbors. If you cannot rise up in future health together, you will all suffer toward extinction alone. For extinction is the drumbeat now within the whole planetary family of life, and humans are the drummers of oblivion.
America does not mean sleeping through senseless murder. America means love. Rise up, dear Americans.
Letter VII
America is not a superpower. There is only one enduring superpower and she is Mother Earth.
When America, the greatest military and economic nation in history, turns to the abolition of war, one war-free community at a time, the United States military will become even larger and more valuable because it will transform into the business of living beyond the business of killing. In hundreds and hundreds of beneficial ways, Americans will do their national service in honor of living and life itself – everyone ready to give life to protect life but not with acts of premeditated killing.
This American victory of military maturation will be so courageous and triumphant, it will ring the bell of liberty throughout future generations celebrated in great gratitude. This victory, this abolition of war as an institution of foreign policy, will open the soul of all humanity to go forward to reunite the eternal environment with the essential economy, with what might be called the political economy of the entire family of life on Earth.
As with the new concepts of biology only a few decades old and standing for the study of life, Americans will lead the world in the invention of new words to mean the power of life, the meaning and value of life, and the transformation of capitalism into the optimization of all life on Earth. As with all profound maturation, the transformation of capitalism is a change of meaning and value from money and property to wisdom and health, from the obsession with the material to the celebration of the spiritual. This leap of growth has always been America’s destiny, and it will return joy and pride to the wounded souls of all Americans.
