The philosophy of “mind in all” is called panpsychism and dates back to the time of Plato. All creatures, of any race, creed or color, great or small, in fact everything material whether animate or inanimate, have an individual consciousness (awareness or sentience). Consciousness is a fundamental quality of the cosmos and of all Creation on this planet–as fundamental as space, time, matter and energy.
Contrary to this Truth, many believe that the “white” race is superior to other races. This long-standing belief triggers fear and hatred, often resulting in violence and bloodshed in America and around the world.
Even with the best intentions in our most “civilized” communities, we will not succeed in creating sustainability if we are unaware of the nature of Reality (Oneness), the Truth of our being, and specifically if we are not conscious of our beliefs and how they influence our behavior.
For example, the most traumatic experience in American history was our Civil War. Even today historians argue about what the goals of the war were or whether they were achieved. Of course the answer is that we never knew what the goals were and didn’t achieve anything in that war which, like all wars, was pointless and self-destructive.
As for ending slavery, there was never any genuine effort or intention to give African Americans–who were considered the other, that is to say, subhuman–the status of citizen on a par with white Americans. Consciously or unconsciously the old worldview has prevailed. In his book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates published in 1866, Edward Alfred Pollard revealed the unconscious goals that began to reveal themselves as soon as General Lee rode Traveller away from the courthouse at Appomattox. “‘No one can read aright the history of America,’ Pollard wrote, ‘unless in the light of a North and a South.’ For all its bloodshed, he argued, the Civil War ‘did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State rights … and these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim and still assert them in their rights and views.’”[i]
That old worldview (that African Americans are subhuman) which drove human behavior, was focused on goals other than the emancipation of the African American. “And in order to solve the problem we must seek its source, not in the negro but in the white American (in the process by which he was educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income).”[ii]
James Baldwin imagined an interior monologue of the white American who has been raised on the false history of the Lost Cause. “‘Do not blame me … I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me … but, on the same day … in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much’–a history manipulated to make the unspeakable palatable.”[iii]
Nevertheless we all continue to pay
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Supplemental Reading: Consciousness I, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#61 Mind in All
[i] Meacham, Jon. “The South’s Fight for White Supremacy.” The New York Times Book Review. September 6, 2020, p. 12.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
