Gospel of the Open Road: According to Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau

By Robert C. Gordon, PhD

Gospel of the Open Road reclaims Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau as Americas spiritual birthright. It rescues them from literary history, and reveals them in their true light: as democracys prophets of the soul. Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau were religious seers who developed a new form of spirituality, and Gospel of the Open Road explains, in scholarly yet passionate fashion, the deep wisdom that is their enduring legacy. It presents them as a viable spiritual path for those who do not belong, and do not want to belong, to any organized religion.But this book does more. It draws fascinating parallels between the new spirituality taught by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and ancient spiritual wisdom as found in shamanism, Goddess worship, Tantra, Taoism, Confucianism, Vajrayana and Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. This book is an evocative synthesis of humanitys most venerable spiritual wisdom and the most modern of philosophical, social, psychological, political, scientific, and Humanistic concepts. It traces the New Age spiritual revolution to its source in Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and explains how to apply their spiritual teachings to our everyday life here on Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 28, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469711539

Robert C. Gordon, PhD

Robert C. Gordon received his B.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, his M.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the History of Religion. He has been a lifelong student of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. He has taught philosophy and religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of New Mexico at Taos. His previous books have won three awards, including selection to the Outstanding Academic Books list of the American Library Association. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Open Road of Integral Culture

Whitman leads each of us to the top of a knoll. As he circles us around the waist with his left hand, his right hand points to vast vistas of continents, and the plain public road that winds over and through them. Whitman’s road is his poetic symbol for a new way of life, for a new way of living in the light of the Spirit, and realizing the divine power that is our deepest inner nature. Teaching this new Gospel is Whitman’s highest purpose, as he reveals in Starting From Paumanok,

Democracy! Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully

singing. For those who belong here, and those to come, I, exultant, to be ready for them, will now shake out carols

stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.

Each is not for its own sake; I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky, are for Religion’s sake. I too, following many, and follow’d by many, inaugurate a Re-ligion,—I descend into the arena; Know you! solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater

Religion, The following chants, each for its kind, I sing.¹

Planting the seeds of a new religion, Whitman prophesied that they would germinate a new kind of human being and a new kind of human culture. Manifestly, he planted in good earth, because his prophecy has now been fulfilled. This flowering sociologist Paul Ray designates as Integral Culture.

Ray formulated the concept of Integral Culture from data he collected for his 1996 study of the basic world views of the American people. He found that Americans fall into three major groups, which he calls: Traditionalists, Modernists, and Cultural Creatives. Cultural Creatives, the newest of these three groups, and the torchbearers of Integral Culture, are so called because they are coming up with most new ideas in US culture, operating on the leading edge of cultural change.² They began to emerge in the 1960s, and today represent a social movement of 44 million people, or 24 percent of the population.

According to Ray’s analysis, they comprise two complementary streams: the Core Cultural Creatives (10.6 percent of the population, or 20 million people) and the Green Cultural Creatives (13 percent of the population, or 24 million people). The 24 million Green Cultural Creatives share environmental and social ideals with the Core CCs, but have only an average interest in spirituality, psychology or person-centered values. They appear to take their cues from the Core CCs and tend to be middle class.³ By contrast, an intense concern with spirituality defines the 20 million Core Cultural Creatives. Ray describes them as people who are,

seriously concerned with psychology, spiritual life, self-actualization, self-expression; like the foreign and exotic (are xenophiles); enjoy mastering new ideas; are socially concerned; advocate women’s issues; and are strong advocates of ecological sustainability. They tend to be leading-edge thinkers and creators. They tend to be upper-middle-class and their male-female ratio is 33:67, twice as many women as men.⁴

The emergence of Integral Culture is notable because its membership of 44 million people is bigger than any comparable group seen at the birth of any previous societal renaissance.⁵ As Ray points out, this group included more people at its formation than were numbered in any other newly developing social movement. He further states that Integral Culture during the past thirty years has become an ever more influential cultural force, initiating one of those infrequent but powerful periods of cultural transformation that periodically uplift the human species.

However new, Integral Culture does have historical roots that Ray traces to various spiritual movements that developed during the Renaissance, and to the nineteenth century American Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. To these historical influences the members of Integral Culture have added ideas drawn from the New Age movement, Transpersonal and Humanistic psychology, ecology, and feminism—sources which all date from the 1960s or later. According to Ray, Core Creatives have synthesized a new worldview with a new set of values. Compared to the rest of society, Ray says, the bearers of Integral Culture have values that are more idealistic and spiritual, have more concern for relationships and psychological development, are more environmentally concerned, and are more open to creating a positive future.⁶

While CCs are centrally concerned with their own spiritual growth, they balance this self-concern with a genuine concern for collective well-being and the rebuilding of communities through dedicated service. They have a strong sense of interdependence with others which translates into caring social action, finding fulfillment in helping others and improving cultural life as a whole. An appreciation of Nature as sacred translates into simpler lifestyles and a strong concern for global problems of over-population and pollution. Thus Integral Culture represents a fresh ecological and spiritual worldview which Ray sums up as a new set of psychological development techniques; a return in spiritual practices and understandings to the perennial psychology and philosophy; and an elevation of the feminine to a new place in recent human history.⁷

At the heart of Integral Culture’s emergence is a new spiritual vision. As Ray points out, Integral Culture begins with Emerson and the Transcendentalists.⁸ Its ultimate source is the spiritual wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. Gospel of the Open Road will illuminate the spiritual teachings of these three great American prophets—what Whitman called their New World Metaphysics. Between these seers and the Core Creatives, there is an unbroken line of apostolic succession.

If Emerson is the founding prophet of Integral Culture, Whitman and Thoreau are his two greatest disciples. From the founders the torch passes to Richard Maurice Bucke and William James; from Bucke and James to Robinson Jeffers; and from Jeffers to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Snyder are the spiritual inspiration for and intellectual heart of the Beats, who prepared the way for the Aquarian Revolution that began in the 1960s.

The ’60s gave birth to Integral Culture, a new type of paradigm that had both immediate and long-term personal, spiritual and political consequences, and quickly became the second most powerful social revolution in American history. Only the Abolition Movement of the nineteenth century transcends in scope the cultural realignment effected by the ’60s. As the novelist Tom Robbins says, the ’60s were an embryonic golden age whose magic years were not merely different from but superior to the previous decades: Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough…a collective spiritual awakening.⁹

This spiritual awakening resulted in the extension of civil rights to racial minorities and gays; the validation of ethnic pride; feminism; the right to abortion; the sexual revolution; the psychedelic revolution; the ecology movement; the proliferation of alternative spiritualities; the dismantling of the tyranny of the Christian majority (which imposed its prayers on public functions and symbols on public places); the spread of alternative methods of healing; an awareness of the relationship between consciousness and health; the emergence of health food (including the practices of vegetarianism and organic gardening) and an awareness of the relationship between nutrition and disease; the move to decriminalize victimless crime; a lifting of censorship on artistic expression; a revolution in music; opposition to unjust war; scepticism toward government; and a wide-scale attack (based on models of interactivity and the sharing of decision-making responsibility) on top-down social relations, whether in personal life, business, or government. All of these manifestations of Integral Culture began in the ’60s. The new lifestyles, laws, and institutions they brought into being are still vital today. And their ultimate source and origin is the new spiritual vision—the New World Metaphysics—of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau.

The relationship between New World Metaphysics and the rise of Integral Culture is widely recognized by many figures seminal to the Aquarian revolution. Both Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg were well read in and deeply influenced by New World Metaphysics, an influence effectively symbolized by Ginsberg’s choice of lines from Leaves of Grass as the epigraph for Howl. Timothy Leary explicitly saw himself as a descendant of Emerson’s non-conformist tradition, and praised him for developing a system of ideas central to the ’60s: individuality, inner growth, self-reliance, rejection of authority. Leary also recognized Emerson as teaching the basic spiritual wisdom of the Aquarian revolution: find God within, develop inner potential, and drop out of organized Christianity.¹⁰

Ken Wilber, a founder of Transpersonal Psychology and a towering figure in contemporary Integral Culture, in his writings quotes extensively from Emerson. Wilber’s analysis of Emerson reveals a deep and searching grasp of New World Metaphysics and its relationship to the ideals of Integral Culture. Willis Harman, another founder of Transpersonal Psycology, calls it the new transcendentalism.¹¹ In The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson devotes several pages to an analysis of the common ground shared by the Transcendentalists and the Aquarians. Of the Conspirators in America, she concludes that adherents may sometimes use Eastern symbols, but their essential spiritual life is better understood through the American lineage of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, the Shakers, and others.¹² Ferguson cites the California Transcendentals, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, and Gary Snyder, as key figures who kept the wisdom of Transcendentalism alive in America during its lean times from the 1920s to the ’50s. Rick Fields recognized the Transcendentalists as the first Americans to embrace Oriental religious teachings, and credits them for pioneering a path followed by many members of Integral Culture. We have already noted that Paul Ray, the chronicler of Integral Culture, traces it to Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Interestingly, it was neither Emerson nor Whitman (the most visible exponents of Transcendentalism in the nineteenth century) who most influenced the dawning of Aquarius. That honor goes to Thoreau, whose works enjoyed enormous popularity with the rising counterculture and went through numerous editions during the ’60s and ’70s.

The intelligentsia of Integral Culture agree that the seed idea from which it grows is a new conception of the purpose of life. As Wiggs Dannyboy, one of the heroes of Tom Robbins’ great novel Jitterbug Perfume explains in his Irish brogue, the purpose of human life is expeditin’ the evolution o’ consciousness.¹³ This seed idea, first expressed in Emerson’s book Nature, is the ultimate spiritual source of Integral Culture and the basis for the Gospel of the Open Road. To travel the prophet’s Open Road is to expedite the evolution of consciousness, in a great adventure of spiritual growth and conscious evolution.

A popular bumper sticker sums up the new spiritual paradigm: ‘Born

O.K. the First Time.’ Rejecting the idea of salvation, Integral Culture replaced it with the concept of spiritual evolution. As the ‘Born O.K.’ bumper sticker implies, you don’t need to get reborn and saved—you need to evolve—so work on yourself. This simple but metaphysically far-reaching insight inspired people to begin exploring methods of self-transformation. These included meditation, yoga, chanting, psychedelics, dietary changes, and the psychological techniques of the Human Potential Movement. All of these are methods to expedite the evolution of consciousness, the essential goal of Aquarian spirituality.

Since the very ideal at the heart of Integral Culture—the ideal of conscious evolution—begins with Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, it makes good sense to return to the founding prophets for guidance on the highway of spiritual growth and development. Read on for the Gospel according to Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and learn how to use its inspiration to transform the worn and dusty path of ordinary life into the Open Road of conscious spiritual evolution.

CHAPTER TWO

The Road Warriors of Integral Culture

Since the purpose of life is to expedite the evolution of consciousness in order to realize our inner divine nature, the obvious question is: How do we do this? According to the Gospel of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, we do so by living in a new way. The basis for this new way of life is what Joan Borysenko describes as the feminine values of relationality and interdependence.¹ According to Borysenko, these values grow from the gift of interdependent perception,² which she defines as a sense of self in relation to others that is a model for the inherently feminine view of life as an interdependent web of mutually enhancing relationships.³ While western culture for centuries has been ruled by the masculine ideal of self-in-isolation, or rugged individualism, Integral Culture replaces it with the feminine ideal of self-in-relation, or enlightened individualism.

The popular movie The Road Warrior is the story of an individual who undergoes the transformation from self-in-isolation to self-inrelation. On the surface a violent thriller, on a deeper level it teaches an important truth of Integral Culture. At the opening of the film, the hero is the classic rugged individualist who cares only for himself and his own survival. As the story unfolds, the hero meets a group of people who are trapped behind the barriers they have erected to protect them from a band of ruthless marauders. With their resources dwindling, their only hope is to break out and to flee to a new place where they can begin life anew. Realizing that they need the help of the Road Warrior in order to succeed, they plead for his assistance. True to his rugged individualism he refuses, and attempts to escape alone from the marauders’ encirclement. Pursued in a desperate chase, he crashes his muscle-car and is badly injured. Just as the marauders are about to capture him, the people whom he has refused to help miraculously rescue him and take him back to their refuge where they nurse him to health.

During his recovery, the Road Warrior comes to the profound realization that he, too, is a self-in-relation to other people. He realizes that he has been saved by others and that he must in return help them save themselves. Because of his inner transformation, the Road Warrior agrees to undertake the most dangerous part of the escape plan—decoying the marauders away from the main group so that they can flee to freedom. The plan works perfectly and the group escapes. While the Road Warrior does not join them and goes his own way, when he takes to the Open Road he is a new and different man. As the film fades to the credits, Mel Gibson stands tall on the Open Road, a transformed individual. He has realized the truth that we are all selves-in-relation. He has made the all-important shift from rugged to enlightened individualism.

According to the Gospel of the Open Road, the concept of enlightened individualism is the equivalent of Borysenko’s self-in-relation. Both are based on what she calls the feminine principles of interdependence.⁴ However, this author prefers the expression enlightened individualism, because it emphasizes our interdependence with others as well as the importance of being true to our individual self. Thus, while New World Metaphysics puts great emphasis on the enlightened feminine principles of interdependence, it balances interdependence with what Joseph Campbell would call following your bliss, or pursuing your own individual path in life. In other words, it balances individualism with an appreciation of our oneness with each other and with Nature. Interdependence plus individualism equals enlightened individualism.

Striking a balance between individualism and interdependendence is one of the most important themes in Gospel of the Open Road.

Enlightened individualism depends on our embracing a system of spiritual beliefs which manifest as a new way of living. Living our daily life in the light of our deepest spiritual beliefs nurtures our inner divinity. It accelerates the evolution of consciousness. To live a life of enlightened individualism expedites our conscious evolution and nurtures our growth to Enlightenment, to the realization of our inner divine power. Thus New World Metaphysics can be summarized in this simple formula: You and everything else in the universe are manifestations of divine power. The purpose of life is for all sentient beings to realize this truth. To achieve this realization, you must do all you can to expedite the evolution of your consciousness. To expedite your conscious evolution, you must live a life of enlightened individualism. How to live a life of enlightened individualism is Emerson’s, Whitman’s, and Thoreau’s central teaching.

This book will explain how to become a Warrior on the Open Road of conscious evolution—how to grow towards Enlightenment through a life of enlightened individualism. Thus, Road Warriors are a new kind of individual, one who follows his or her bliss and yet also lives according to the feminine principles of interdependence. This balance of individualism and interdependence provides the fundamental code of enlightened individualism. In a hit song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the artists remind us,

You, who are on the road, must have a code, That you can live by.⁵

The wisdom of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau is the code of those on the Open Road. The New World Metaphysics of our great prophets is the Gospel for the Road Warriors of Integral Culture.

CHAPTER THREE

The Chalice, the Blade, and the Goddess

If the shift to self-in-relation or enlightened individualism represents a turning to feminine values, what is the best way to establish these values? The best way to establish feminine values, Whitman affirms, is to worship the Goddess. The brilliant cultural critic Camille Paglia, with most of whose opinions concerning American Transcendentalism this author disagrees, at least gets the most important thing about Whitman right. Whitman invents the American nature-mother, she tells us. By bardic instinct rather than learning, he revives the cosmology of the ancient mother cults.¹ The seeds of the new religion planted by Whitman are the seeds of Goddess worship. In New World Metaphysics, the Goddess rules. Whitman agrees with Joan Borysenko that, As the world becomes more a melting pot, feminine power is increasingly important.² No book better explains the reason for this than Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade.

Prior to 10,000 B.C.E., human beings were hunters and gatherers who followed religions based on shamanism. The Neolithic Revolution—the development of agriculture—inspired the rise of the great religions of the Earth Goddess. They prevailed from 10,000 to 5,000 B.C.E. Then arose the religions of the Sky God. The Indo-European conquest of India brought with it a worship of Indra the male Sky God, who replaced the Earth Goddess of the indigenous Dravidian people. In Greece, the male Sky God Apollo replaced the ancient fertility religions’ Earth Goddess. In the middle-East the Hebrews arose, worshipping a male Sky God, Yahweh, and from Judaism emerged both Christianity and Islam—Sky God religions as well. All of these Sky God religions made war, both literally and figuratively, on the Earth religions of the Goddess. The Chalice and the Blade tells the story of this conflict, and its consequences for human experience.

The Chalice symbolizes for Eisler the cultural values of those who worship the Earth Goddess, and the Blade symbolizes the values of those who follow the Sky God. How different are these cultures! The primary cultural characteristic of the agriculture-based societies of the Chalice was an emphasis on peaceful co-existence. Their key symbol was that of a woman giving birth, and the essence of their spiritual life was its recognition of our oneness with all of nature.³ From this flowed their artistic focus which graphically represented the unity of all things in nature, as personified by the Goddess.⁴

With respect to personal relations, societies of the Chalice were both socially and sexually egalitarian. The primary application of their technology was for peaceful and constructive purposes. For cultures of the Earth Goddess, the Chalice is an eminently appropriate symbol, representing as it does the feminine power to nurture and to give. Interdependence, nurturing, giving—these qualities represent the psychological and spiritual core of the ancient agricultural societies of the Goddess.

In the radically different societies of the Blade, the primary cultural characteristic was a lust for conquest and domination. Their key symbol was the all-powerful male Sky God who represents the ideal strong man on Earth. With respect to personal relations, societies of the Blade were hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal. The purposes of their technology were primarily war-like. The Blade is the appropriate symbol for these societies, representing as it does the masculine power to dominate and to take by force.

As the war-like societies of the Blade destroyed the peace-loving societies of the Chalice, they forced a radical ideological shift. Over time, as Eisler explains, The power to dominate and destroy through the blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life.⁵ In cultures of the Blade, the strong man rather than the nurturing woman became the social and religious focus. Simultaneously, the social order became ever more male-dominant, hierarchical and warlike.

Eisler concludes that historical epochs or cultures which stress the feminine values of the Chalice are characterized by cooperation, creativity, freedom, and cultural resurgence. In cultures of the Earth Goddess the key characteristics are peace, linking, equality, creativity, and compassion. The concept of progress is also an essentially feminine ideal, representing a belief that improvement of conditions here on Earth, not our disposition after death, is central to human well-being. By contrast, historical epochs or cultures which stress the masculine values of the Blade are characterized by competition, political and creative repression, and eventual cultural eclipse. In cultures of the Sky God, the key characteristics are bellicosity, hierarchy, sterility, and unconcern about others. The cultural focus is not on improving conditions on Earth but rather on attainment of a remote Heaven, achieved by means of obedience to the Sky God and his priests.

Small wonder, given the foregoing comparison, that Eisler advocates Goddess worship. Based on her action research—the study of what was, in order better to understand how we might intervene in our own evolution—Eisler champions a return to the worship of divinity in feminine form. This author agrees with Eisler that many of the problems presently plaguing the Earth result from the influence of the major Sky God religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and their cultures of the Blade. If we intervene in our own evolution and establish Goddess worship, we can generate the more positive social values characteristic of societies guided by the consciousness of our unity or linking with one another and all else in the universe.⁶ New World Metaphysics establishes this consciousness of unity through celebration of divine power in feminine form.

Of our three founding prophets, Whitman alone upholds worship of the Goddess. While he shares general metaphysical principles with Emerson and Thoreau, he is the only one of the three to conceive of the primal energy of the universe as female. In fact, all of the important features of his cosmology are feminine.

The glory of the feminine is at the heart of Whitman’s poetry. He celebrates both the Earth and America, the symbol of liberty and human progress, as female. And on the level of practical life, Whitman looked to the elevation of women as the key to transforming the social order. He believed that the emancipation of women would revolutionize society by instilling the values of the Chalice. Since teaching the feminine values of the Chalice—cooperation, creativity, freedom, peace, linking, equality, compassion, progress, and conscious evolution—through reverence for the divine as female was the essential purpose of Whitman’s New World Metaphysics, Gospel of the Open Road focuses on his prophetic message.

Whitman’s veneration of divine power as feminine inspires this author to see him as the fulfillment of New World Metaphysics. I agree with all of those in Riane Eisler’s camp: we must worship divinity in feminine form—not only for the reasons Eisler gives, but for others that will be made clear in Book Six. Also, Whitman celebrates rather than denies the body, a celebration in harmony with Humanism’s affirmation of human nature. He agrees with the ancient Tantrics that the key to conscious evolution is converting sensual into spiritual energy. By contrast, Emerson holds rather conventional and conservative view concerning the body, while Thoreau is positively ascetic. For these reasons, I consider Whitman the fulfillment and highest prophet of New World Metaphysics. But those who do not resonate with Whitman’s conception of divine power as feminine, or who do not agree that the sensual can become the spiritual, can draw their inspiration from Emerson and Thoreau. Neither thought of divine power as female, and neither could ever be accused of seeking spiritual experience through fleshly pleasures. A later chapter will provide a list of names and expressions for divine power drawn from Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Some of these are masculine, some feminine, and some gender-free. If you don’t resonate with the feminine expressions for divine power that appear in Open Road, simply make a mental substitution, using terms that suit yourself.

Even though Open Road gives Whitman pride of place among the founders, all three prophets must be heard to make their new spiritual vision coherent and complete. Neither Whitman nor Thoreau can be understood without a thorough grounding in Emerson, nor is Whitman’s message clear without reference to Emerson and Thoreau. All three are necessary, and will be given ample opportunity to have their say. And while Emerson and Thoreau do not think of divine power in feminine terms and differ with Whitman concerning sensuality, they share Whitman’s most central principle: that divine power is the deepest nature of manifest creation and that believing this is the most effective means of instilling feminine values. They agree with Whitman that the crying need of the Earth is for the ascendance of feminine values, and that living according to these values expedites our conscious evolution, thereby fulfilling the purpose of life and bringing us ever closer to the ultimate human goal of full Enlightenment.

CHAPTER FOUR

The First White Aboriginal

For modern sceptics, worship of the Goddess conjures up images of Druids in mossy forests and ancient temples of augury and sacrifice. It seems a hopelessly archaic religious approach with little relevance to the modern world. Camille Paglia, one of the most biting critics of Goddess worship, is the chief proponent of this point of view. Paglia maintains that a religion of the Goddess is untenable in a non-agrarian society out of sync with nature’s rhythms. While she concedes that Goddess worship was appropriate in an ancient agricultural setting, she dismisses it is a cultural anachronism in our urbanized, industrialized civilization. According to Paglia, Goddess worship denies the individualism essential to the development of western culture, and is therefore inapposite to the modern world.

Paglia has a point. The ancient agricultural religions of the Goddess did not allow for individualism, stressing instead social control and conformity. As Joseph Campbell remarks, these early agrarian social systems were geared to suppressing the manifestations of individualism, basing their world view on what he calls the lesson of the plants. What lesson do the plants teach? Look at any grain field. Endless acres of identical plants. That is their lesson: everyone should be the same. When a psyche is acculturated through the lesson of the plants, explains Campbell, the inevitable consequence is that personal spontaneity and every impulse to self-discovery is purged away.¹

While conceding Paglia’s historical point—that the ancient agricultural religions suppressed individualism—her dismissal of the possibility of a modern Goddess worship can be questioned. It fails to take into account the subtlety and brilliance of Whitman’s cosmology. The genius and power of New World Metaphysics lies in its reconciliation of modern western individualism and the ancient worship of the Great Mother. Whitman’s resurrection of the Goddess is no mere revival of some ancient cult figure. It is a complete reconceptualization of Goddess worship in the light of Humanistic individualism. The great English novelist D.H. Lawrence, who passionately loved Whitman’s poetry, was the first to reach this insight.

In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s most important novel (perhaps not his best written, but his most important in revealing his spiritual agenda), he makes a prediction. He predicts a fusion of the aboriginal culture of the indigenous people of the Americas with the white culture of the invading Europeans. Lawrence says that when this fusion occurs, The living result will be a new germ, a new conception of human life. In other words, while Lawrence foresees the death of both the indigenous aboriginal culture and the white European culture, he says they will not entirely disappear. Before dying, they will marry and conceive a new being very different from either parent. Lawrence envisions a sinking of both beings, into a new being.²

When Lawrence read Leaves of Grass, he knew instinctively that Walt Whitman fulfilled his prediction. Whitman was the first new being in the New World, and his wisdom was the new conception of human life that Lawrence foresaw would arise from the fusion of aboriginal and white consciousness. Of New World Metaphysics Lawrence said (in a strikingly insightful passage about Whitman’s wisdom),

It is a great new doctrine. A doctrine of life, not of salvation. A

new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salva

tion. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving

herself. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road. This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking out in him. He is the first white aboriginal.³

Lawrence perceived that the secret to Whitman’s poetic and visionary power lay in the cross-breeding of white, Humanistic individualism and an aboriginal veneration of the divine power at the heart of creation.

Whitman is an aboriginal because he sees all of nature as a manifestation of the Goddess. But he is also white because he accepts Humanism’s credo of individualism and diversity, along with the political, artistic, economic and intellectual freedoms it has inspired. Thus he is the spiritual progeny of a white Humanistic father and a dark aboriginal Goddess. Their union brought forth New World Metaphysics. When white Humanistic individualism inseminated aboriginal Goddess worship—voila!—the birth of the first white aboriginal: a worshipper of the Goddess BUT a worshipper genetically transformed by Humanistic individualism. That Whitman’s poetic genius gave birth to this new being is his enduring claim to greatness.

Whitman’s New World Metaphysics is a genetic mixing of the most ancient worship of the Goddess and the most modern Humanistic individualism. It is the combining of these two different genetic patterns that makes Whitman’s New World Metaphysics something new under the sun. Their mix gave birth to something unique in human history. Past veneration of the Goddess excluded individualism. Present Humanistic cultural forms and institutions founded on individualism have no conception of the Goddess. The successful cross-breeding of these two powerful forces is the heart of the New World Metaphysics. While New World Metaphysics represents a return to the worship of the feminine divine, it is a worship very different from that which prevailed in the pre-Humanistic past. Whitman’s new worship of the Goddess is a worship informed, inspired, and underwritten by the individualism of the Humanistic Revolution.

In keeping with Humanistic individualism, Whitman affirmed that the New World Metaphysics must be in harmony with and derive insights from scientific discovery. He accepted democratic individualism, as well as the intellectual and religious freedom and the right of spiritual self-discovery that it presupposes. He endorsed the right to free artistic expression, although he also insisted upon the morally purposive and inspirational responsibility of the artist to society. Finally, he defended the free market, while at the same time warning against descent into a grasping materialism. These principles of white Humanistic individualism represent the highest contribution of Western culture to the global future.

In the dawning New Integral World, Anglo-European culture contributes the genetic pattern of Humanistic individualism, and its attendant character traits: science, democracy, free minds, and free markets. When this white father cross-bred with the dark aboriginal Goddess, the new conception of human life Lawrence predicted came into being. An interracial hybrid, the enlightened individualism of New World Metaphysics, was born. Thus while Whitman’s new conception of human life, his Greater religion, does represent a resurrection of the feminine divine, it is a resurrection well adapted to modern culture because, like all Humanistically-derived cultural forms and institutions, it is predicated on individualism.

Even more important with respect to its suitability for modern life is the fact that Whitman’s Goddess worship is quite different from that of the ancient agricultural societies. In Whitman’s form of worship, we need not set up altars to a female deity, because his worship is not about augury or sacrifice. Rather it is about profound conceptual change. The magic of Whitman’s poetry lies in helping us make this conceptual change. Through his poetic enchantment we are freed from conceiving of divine power as a Sky God looking down from Heaven and passing judgment on us. We are becharmed to conceive of divine power as the Great Mother’s female loving energy generating and permeating the universe, while drawing us forward in our spiritual quest through the attractive power of Her loving presence. In New World Metaphysics, worship of the Goddess means making this conceptual change.

On the Open Road, you need no special altars nor gilded statues of the Goddess. You don’t need to choose the name of a Goddess from a book. This religious paraphernalia is unnecessary because, as we shall shortly see, the Road Warrior worships at the altar of everyday experience. The Open Road of life is itself the Road Warrior’s altar. Enlightened individualism is the sacrament. The Gospel of the Open Road is the sermon and the lesson, as the soul, in Lawrence’s words, lives her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road. And the Goddess? She is the incarnate mystery: at once the soul, the Road Warrior, the Open Road, the sacrament, the altar, the sermon, the lesson, and the object of worship.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dynamic World of Integral Culture

If one signal deficiency of the ancient agricultural religions was the suppression of individualism, the other major defect, at least so far as the modern world is concerned, was its static character, a lack of any sense of change. The pre-eminent reality of modern society, that it is in constant flux, was unknown to cultures that followed the ancient Goddess religions. Foreign to their world was the idea of progress—or even the idea that in the future things might be very different from the way they were at present. In the ancient cultures of the Goddess, people lived simple lives within unchanging set roles. Time for them was cyclic, not linear, and worship of the Goddess was in an important sense a recognition of this fact. In their world nothing changed much except the seasons. True, individuals were born, flourished, and died, but this meant that individual life was also but another cyclic phenomenon.

While the old agricultural religions of the Goddess taught the conformist and cyclically repeated lesson of the plants, Whitman’s new form of Goddess worship teaches the Humanistic lesson of change. To understand this lesson, it is necessary to learn something about the Humanistic Revolution, investigating the white side of Whitman’s genealogy and tracing individualism back to the Humanistic Revolution, its earliest ancestor. In other words, a strong emphasis on Goddess worship laid the basis for a culture of interdependence—the aboriginal side of Whitman’s genealogy. He added to this a strong sense of individualism, which represents the white side of his family tree. It is from this side of the family that Whitman inherits the lesson of progress, a genetically vital character trait in the dawning New Integral World.

Dating from Columbus’ epic voyage in 1492, Humanism celebrated the dignity of the human being and the essential value of life in the world. Basing itself on the classic literature of Greece and Rome rather than Biblical revelation, Humanism rejected Christianity’s doctrine of original sin, affirmed human nature, and praised the human condition. Its life-affirming attitudes and focus on individualism and individual achievement inspired the European Renaissance, the birth of modern science, the age of exploration, the rise of democracy, and rapid economic and social development.

All of the above developments originated in the spirit of questing individualism that is the defining characteristic of the Humanistic Revolution. It is this spirit that sets King Alobar on his personal quest in Jitterbug Perfume. Inspired by the concept of the uniqueness of a single human life, he was seeking to become something singular out of his singular experience.¹ Encouraging Alobar’s individualism, the old shaman counsels him to ride this strange wind that is blowing through you; to ride it to wherever it will carry you.²

To ride the wind of Humanistic individualism is to question received wisdom and discover truth for yourself. Humanism asserts the individual’s right to question all given knowledge in the light of new ideas and new facts. Rejecting the authoritarian dictates of the past, Humanism tries all ideas at the bar of progressively emerging human wisdom and understanding. As the shaman counsels Alobar, he need not meekly submit to the demands of tradition, because existence can be rearranged.³

Alobar distills the wisdom of the old shaman into a creed that sums up the Humanistic Revolution: Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things. I am special and free. And the world is round.⁴ Because we have the individual power to re-order our existence, the essence of Humanism is individual freedom in all areas of life. This new-found sense of freedom produced dramatic effects in western culture. Whitman describes,

The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise; Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in spring.⁵

This newly awakened human enterprise directly inspired the rise of the modern world.

What awakened this spirit of questing individualism? The sociologist David Reisman’s distinction between tradition-directed and innerdirected social systems will help us answer this question. In the pre-Humanistic world of medieval Europe, people conformed their external behavior to the rules and institutions of their society. In Reisman’s terms, they were tradition-directed. Their personalities were adapted to the fixed and unchanging codes of feudal society and the Christian traditions of their Sky God religion. For this reason, people in the pre-Humanistic world were ill-prepared to deal with the new. Since they were guided by rigid and unchangeable rules that were externally imposed, their effectiveness in life depended upon a reasonable degree of social stability.

The social stability of the medieval world began to break down when the Black Death ravaged Europe, killing