Astral Facts, January 2014
MiLKing the Dream
Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.
MiLKing the Dream
I have been thinking about this topic in the last few weeks as the holiday approached to celebrate the birth and life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (However, the celebration comes on the Monday nearest his January 15th birthday, rather than the actual day itself.) As most of us know, his most famous message is the “I Have a Dream” keynote speech given on August 28, 1963. For many children, the holiday fulfills their dream of a day off from school (the students in my college classes might agree) and shoppers find dream bargains at the holiday sales, which sometime go on all weekend. Groups have breakfasts, lunches, and dinners as fundraisers for their various activities. We have basketball tournaments, environmental “clean-up” projects throughout the area, groups preparing disaster hygiene kits, and even Humane Society activities to make braided toys for cats and dogs. (Just Google “Martin Luther King Day activities” for details of 224,000 other links to lists of activities.)
With so much variation, we might pause to consider the “dream” lying at the root of such variation. Fortunately, the textbook for my English 101 class does have the transcript of that keynote speech from 50.5 years ago. In that speech, Rev. Dr. King mentions the “promissory note” embedded and imbedded in “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” as the foundation of human dignity, spirit, and value. Rev. Dr. King’s concern was to recognize the time to “to make real the promises of democracy, ….the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all God’s children.” That is the essence of his dream, which was promised in the founding of this country.
Fortunately, the textbook for my English 101 class also has the content of the Declaration of Independence as well. In fact, it is the selection just prior to Rev. Dr. King’s text. In this text, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, he states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”: a statement most Americans can probably repeat in content if not word for word. What most may not be familiar with is the bulk of the remainder: a list of wrongs done by the king of England at that time. The next eighteen paragraph points all begin with the phrasing “He has …”with the thirteenth point listing nine separate violations in that specific category. In essence, Jefferson has noted that the monarch, endowed with the “Divine Right of Kings,” has not upheld the responsibilities that accompany such “Divine Rights.” The king may have used his authority to establish civil laws that justified his actions, but they were contrary to his Divinely granted authority and responsibility. In other words, the king has not performed the duties prescribed by the Creator, and the people are justified in exercising principles of “shared governance” by renouncing the king’s authority.
While Jefferson was eloquent in expressing the human “rights” of accomplishing the Creator’s dream, he wasn’t as diligent in exercising his personal authority or in compelling others in authority to exercise theirs as well in conjunction with Divine shared governance. In fact, Jefferson was unwilling to “emancipate” even his own slaves, even though at least one of the slaves was the biological mother of his own child.
It was not until September 1862 that Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1st 1863, to extend the so far limited application of the original “promissory note” instigated by Jefferson and acted upon by the Continental Congress. Unfortunately, the text of Lincoln’s proclamation is not in our English 101 textbook. Nonetheless, that content can be easily retrieved online. The text of the “Gettysburg Address,” given nearly a year later, is in our textbook with an ending that includes the statement, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” While this did proclaim an extension of freedom, it was still limited and sparsely enforced, which prompted Rev. Dr. King to declare 100 years later that it was time to fulfill the dream and honor that “promissory note” from the long past. That is the Dream promised in America, and a dream still in progress. Yet, we might ponder where this Dream may have originated, for it does seem to contradict the “survival of the fittest” evolutionary values of contemporary culture.
In another selection from our English 101 textbook, we might find an answer coming from England, the same source as the original irritation of the 1700’s. In his article “The Rival Conceptions of God” C. S. Lewis describes the path that led him from being an atheist to becoming a religious person. The article was originally from a radio talk given in England in 1942 during The Second World War. In the content, Lewis notes that the major basis for his denial of God was that he could not believe in a God who would allow so much injustice to exist. However, as he reflected upon this, he began to wonder why he would have an expectation of finding justice in the world. He came to the conclusion that such an expectation must have originated from something outside himself, which he concluded to be emanating from the same Creator whom Jefferson had referenced as having endowed humans with life and liberty and the inalienable rights to pursue Happiness. In his further reflections, Lewis came to the conclusion that things had “gone awry” through human behavior and God was waiting for humans to put it right again. Thus, the Dream was two-fold – things being put right and this being done by human effort.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had a Dream, but the Dream was driven by a force outside himself, and it was a Dream that included all humanity. During this time when we celebrate his bravery and forbearance, at the cost of his life, in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness in connection with that Dream and its source, perhaps it is good to examine our own dreams and their original sources, especially those Astral in nature.
Walter Lowe
Astral Facts is a somewhat regular presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices during the academic year.
Astral Facts is a somewhat regular presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices during the academic year.
