Original Innocence Returns

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I have not written anything here for quite some time, the reason being that 2008 was a profound and challenging process for me. I needed to pull back and observe what was going on in America – and humanity – leading up to the election. My heart was not into writing or trying to contribute into a culture that seemed determined to create a massive failure of love, common sense, and expansive intelligence.

My work, my writing, and the work that we are all doing to heal depends on there being enough love and heart presence in life to make this work worthwhile. Throughout the last eight years, and the last four especially, I have watched the world in which I came of age — I was there at the beginning of the Human Potential Movement in Palo Alto in the 70's — gradually disappear in the collective heart.

I watched a dark, shadowy presence insinuate itself into America. It lived in the strategy of demonization that lay in the heart of the Republican political agenda, fueled by a force that has controlled America since the very beginning, and that force is shame.

Shame lives in the idea of Original Sin. It was brought over to America in the religious beliefs of the original settlers in the form of Puritanism. It has remained buried deep in the American psyche, acting out in wave after wave of disconnected and heartless aggression such as the Native American Genocide or the slaughter of American workers on the frontier protesting against the unfair practices of the mine owners, or the gunning down of students at Kent State during the Vietnam War.

Shame speaks in many voices: Do as I say, not as I do. Children should be seen and not heard. You want something to cry about? I'll give you something to cry about.

Most recently, it spoke through Dick Cheney's statement that if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, it is legal. Shame justifies the abuse of power without being held to any accountability.

Shame cannot create healthy relationships. It has to control, and create an illusion of intelligence in which it is never really vulnerable. Shame slowly starves the heart, eroding the confidence of love one moment at a time, relentless in its need to be right, to never be exposed. Ultimately, shame always forces things to fail through a tremendous ignorance of what it takes to nurture life.

And that brings us to the present moment in America.


I have always experienced, and thus believed in, the Original Innocence of our souls. It was the dream inside the Human Potential Movement to liberate our hearts and souls from the dark guilts and inhibitions that came from generations of shame, to celebrate sexuality and spirituality, to embrace diversity and to challenge the sweeping dysfunctions of the American Family and to create a psychology based on love.

We live now in a renewed culture in which these goals mean something again within America. As a people, we chose to reject the Politics of Shame that emerged so blatantly in the last eight years. So let us learn now, more than ever, how to confront and bring healing to the forces of shame. Let us become smart about shame and thus lose our fear of it and the failure it creates.

Let us live from our Original Innocence.