What can I say? I am an Indio who, in the process of being assimilated and
totally aculturated, recognized that the long march through the institutions
was not completely in vain. In the process I managed to receive degrees in
Music, Languages and Philosophy. As an X-Jesuit, I recognize the necessity
of extending the ideas of spirituality and community beyond the bounds of
the cloister, the institution and the academy. But here I am at Evergreen,
rather cloistered, institutionalized and academized...a delectable sort of
position. I view it as the kind of a place where hopeful people come to
learn, grow and realize metamorphically that we are not new people doing the
same old things but moving at a pace commensurate with the kinds of problems
we face. Our work must be carried to the market place rather than remain
bogged down in textbooks and institutions. Our entire gamut of laws and
values must be reconstituted to work for the greatest good of the greatest
number, lest we become victims of historical decay, for men are merely cells
in the great body of civilization; and as with the human body, the rate of decay
increases steeply with our ignorance and refusal to accept this fact. Alcoholism
remains the nation's number one social and health problem. Unemployment, poverty,
hunger, crime, suicide, still persist while wages freeze and prices thaw. This out-of-sight,
out-of-mind attitude; i.e., the legislative process is a perfect example of the opposing
forces inherent in western thought which teach us to separate, divide and conquer,
rather than to unify and become. We equate Capitalism and all its sins with freedom,
yet we use freedom as a tool to destroy one another. We insist that all Philosophy
emanates from western Europe. We view the Mexican calendar as merely an interesting
piece of archeology and disregard its perfection, its admonitions and predictions, such
as the end of the Fifth Age being 1986 or 1987 (three years after 1984). We  laugh;
how quaint! How colorful! We make no attempt to understand Native American thought
beyond basket-weaving and dancing. We who have cleverly synthesized  Greek Mythology
and Aristotelian thought into Christian dogma have much to account for as we continue to
splinter the Christendom we fabricated to destroy one another in the name of gods we create
and destroy. We blindly seek the meaning of reality in technology and fail to find it in the bread
we bake, the songs we sing or the sweet small of flowers. What did we come to hear?
..a reed blown by the wind?