Esteemed Reader: April 2004

by Jason Stern, March 18, 2009

Perhaps to be really free, one can’t be a healthy animal in a happy herd. —Kathleen Speeth

Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:

In my hazardous adolescence I harbored a small hope that I would naturally evolve into a healthy, balanced, and happy person. Instead, I felt myself going downhill, my state deteriorating into hopelessness and distraction, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

The world I saw was fraught with unhappiness and pretense. Even those who possessed the supposed keys to happiness—money, food, sex, religious consolation—seemed immune to their palliative charms. No one was happy. It was like all the adults and role-models were bad actors with uninspired scripts who had forgotten they were on stage.

In school we were told that this is the golden age—the most advanced period of human history. As evidence we were shown all the feats of science and technology, our immense ability to understand and manipulate objects and energies. Though I couldn’t help being enamored with gadgets, I couldn’t swallow the notion that we are “advanced” in any real sense. For one thing, nobody I knew could reproduce, much less understand, most of the technology that we use every day. Most people couldn’t even reproduce the technology of a hundred years ago—things like building a home, planting a garden, husbanding a herd. If anything, it seemed to me, humanity had gone backwards.

And then there is what could be called the moral side of human progress. With our vaunted technologies we were waging more war and wreaking more havoc than ever before. Politicians were planning mass-destruction. Humankind killed, robbed, and otherwise abused one another on a grand scale. Even our cultural evolution seemed a failure. It seemed to me that, from the standpoint of what really matters, I was living in something far worse than the Dark Ages.
The constructed world of public school—with its textbooks, ignorant teachers (with a couple of exceptions), standardized testing, and abusive jocks—impelled me to seek. I read voraciously anything that gave an explanation for or pointed a way out of the obvious absurdities of life. Finally, I was given a book called In Search of the Miraculous in which I found some answers.

“In speaking of evolution it is necessary to understand from the outset that no mechanical evolution is possible. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. And ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and ‘will’ cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and ‘doing’ cannot be the result of things which ‘happen.’”