Deep within ourselves we know we do not wish to dream our life away; we wish for truth, not “truth”; we wish for freedom, not “freedom”; we wish for an independence that enables us to serve what is greater than ourselves, not an independence that is little more than an adolescent fantasy of power or nightmarish cosmic isolation.  

Truth, freedom, independence; yes, these are our most treasured American values, but America did not invent them.  Their source lies far back in time, deep within the heart and the spirit of humankind’s great spiritual traditions.  It is America, however, that once brought hope to the world by injecting these values into the lifeblood of modern society.

Even to be begin to put our question in these terms, undefined as they yet may be, is to be thrown a lifeline. Can we take hold of it? Can we ponder what it really means that the values we associate with America originally reflected aspects of ancient timeless wisdom?….that it is in this context we may rediscover the American dream considered as a vision of truth? 

And yet, at the same time, can we recognize at any moment these values may be invaded by counterfeits bearing the same names and wearing the same colors? How to understand that in order to deepen the American dream, it is first of all necessary to awaken from the American dream?

In order to remember the vision of America, we need to free ourselves from the illusion of America. This will require of us at least an honest, first hand approach to the inner, spiritual dimension of our American values—for it is this dimension that the vision is rooted.  And it is this dimension that it is necessary to recover and hold onto. Without it, the vision decays into an illusion: ideas and words that were once life-giving and full of hope inevitably become fantasies that mask our ignorance of ourselves and the kind of work that is actually required of us.

At the same time, it will be necessary to keep our feet on the ground and try to bear in mind what nations really are, including America, and in what rough-and-tumble world they are obliged to act. Without including this element into our inquiry, we run the risk of falling prey to another kind of illusion: a misplaced spirituality that regards the nations as through they were persons, and which holds the American nation to standards of behavior that we ourselves, as individuals, do not and cannot live up to.

Or, what is equally illusory, which regards America as a holy community obliged to act selflessly and meekly in the jungle of the world it lives in…like a community of saints or spiritual aspirants.

At the same time, in order to face this issue squarely; we will have to consider that genuine spiritual community cannot exist in the world as we know it apart from a larger environment of favorable political and social conditions.  

We must proceed with caution.  To distinguish between the two dreams of America, the illusion and the vision, may not be so simple a matter as to label the one materialistic and the other spiritual or ethical. Certainly, the great wisdom teachings of the world invite us to think more carefully than many of us are prone to do.

Jacob Needleman