Dear Family,

It is with heavy heart I write to you this day for there is a genuine despair that has fallen over this land, aye, this world, with the news that our nation will be led by a man devoid of any consideration of the values refined and embraced by civilization. A man clearly driven, and led about by, the tiny cog of ego that eclipses reason and leaves undefended the sincere work of all the generations before.

Historically I would shudder at the distasteful face of such politics and go about my way, for I believe the value of my work far outweighs the impact of my words. However, the shifting landscape of American culture under the onslaught of impulsive and repetitive hubris has created a string of political appointments that will have devastating consequences for our environment, our peaceful way of life, and the way our next generations will be taught. We are putting in place, for the first time, a government that has absolutely stated and demonstrated they will not discuss or cooperate with any idea which is not soundly rooted in their rhetoric.

This, regardless of form of government, or form of thought, is a betrayal of the public trust. That enduring war and environmental disaster are the obvious consequences is secondary in the psyche (the true arena) to this loss of trust and it is in our collective psyche that any remedy must be had.

Now that we have become so calloused in our national dialog I will be blunt: the toehold gained for this sort of reasoning – that it is somehow OK to refuse to discuss important and mutual affairs with the invested parties and take unilateral actions against them – is rooted in our well thought out tolerance of religious expression. Fundamentalist religion, of any stripe, is sacrosanct to its own form, and as such the discussion ends there. In any civilized reasoning, we go about our way. In the current iteration of America, we kneel before the guns.

By persistence, repetition, and the fostering of willful ignorance thugs purporting to be Christians have taken over the most powerful country in the world. Indeed, there are some well-meaning folks who have played along, but one simply has to follow the money, and observe the character of the players to see they are not really Christian, they do not care about you, or values, or what is right. The faithful have been conned, by con men, and due to their intransigence are too scared to see.

The answer, as far as we as individuals need concern ourselves, is this: everything you need to know about God is written first in nature. We came along later and marveled, and sought to describe it in our early attempts at language – a construct of the mind. Yet the heart was here first, always felt, always knew intuitively, has always been intimately entwined with the genetic wonder of our bodies, this amazing and near perfect replication that to this day astounds us and defies explanation.

The heart uses no words, knows no arguments. It is a thinking organ, laced with neurons. It just knows. It needs the mind to absorb, interpret, and advise it. The moment the mind does not serve the heart, it is lost. It can talk itself into anything, will chase ideas down endless rabbit holes in despair when the answers, the solace it seeks, is right there in the heart. It will always be there, it will always ring true. Everybody has one.

It is an essential component of political control, in the training of police and soldiers, to sever this connection. We are trained in this culture to disconnect from our compassion at the flip of the switch. A truly good person, regardless of power or wealth or poverty or vulnerability, never, ever disconnects from their compassion.

We experience this life in the psyche, and this connection is elemental to sanity.

Most of my siblings understand this. They have studied religions and ethics and philosophy ad nauseam, and the conclusions are the same. It comes back to compassion – the active of love. Truth is a cold, hard asteroid in space. Science, yo. Love is flesh and bones on it, the mortal embodiment of truth. Every religion has described God (or divine spirit) as pure truth, and pure love. So I say, look into your heart. Think about it if you must, every moral question comes full circle to the same idea, compassion, and this I call the logic of love. It has primacy over any “spoken” idea, it is rooted in our very desire for life.

The opposite of love is indifference, the active is fear. Fear is easily recognizable: it retracts, it is closed. It puts bars on the windows. It is a thing to be acknowledged, respected, and overcome. Courage.

One of my siblings, as I attempted to iterate this simple, timeless yet profound notion, dismissed it in its entirety without consideration because it conflicted with a notion of his fundamental religion and thus was off the table for any form of discussion. He cited a bible passage, Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” I will say, in the strongest terms, this passage is anathema to everything I know, feel, represent and have espoused my entire life. I feel this passage represents the epitome of twisted and manipulative logic so often inserted into the bible, for the heart alone is ultimately true, it has the power to convince the mind, and everyone can know it. They need only look into their own and see it is an endless font of unconditional love.

I am earnest when I propose that “God,” when He gave us the bible, knew that it was to be assembled in a crude iteration before an illiterate and largely unevolved mankind. As Fr. Finch so succinctly put it: the bible is a guide, a history book, a collection of great wisdoms. It was assembled by man, and should be treated as such.

I feel we were given great minds and the power of thought to build and verify ideas, to evolve our belief – that “God” has faith in us because he understands the logic of love always presents itself and mankind would find his journey comes full circle to His doorstep: perfect truth, and perfect love. To dismiss this, and the centuries-long journey of others, with an arrogant sweep of the hand and a bible quote is the greatest blasphemy.

If you asked me what “God” wants, I would say simply one thing: to be loved. It is the one thing He cannot create or compel (or else it wouldn’t be freely given and thus would not be love) and as such gave us this free will and mind and this amazing world to thrash about in until we came full circle to the logical conclusion. Now there is bliss.

The world is healed from the ground up. Protect the connection between your heart and mind – both are lost without each other. Heal this, and you heal the world.

I go back to my day now, move about underneath these looming atrocities. As you may well know there is a desperate defense being held for water rights now in North Dakota by a cooperation of many American Indian tribes – arguably the only people left in the world today with real moral credibility. They are exercising every notion of peaceful resistance before a relentless and brutal engine that only wants to consume, a greedy cabal that will not allow discussion and detours any dissent down a labyrinth of rules they create themselves, and dismiss on any whim. There is no agreement, no treaty they will not abrogate to suit their needs, for now more than ever they are above the law. They have served their eviction notice upon the water protectors for December 5^th, the birthday of General George Armstrong Custer. It clearly is no coincidence. This, my family, is the landscape before us.

The truth of it may well be that we’ve always been savages, and are actually better now as men than ever. It is just that as our awareness grows, so does our capacity to see and the crimes seem so fresh and monstrous juxtaposed on our recent ignorance. But enough of all that, we have arrived. Few can say they did not know. They just bought into it without really thinking about it. And critical thinking protocols need to be the law. They are not, and now we’ve lost our voice.

I feel these words from the bottom of my heart to the height of my mind. I love you all, it is all I have to give, and doubtless it is enough.

Christopher Boyle

November 29, 2016

The topic of yesterday's letter is moving the issues we face today firmly into the realm of the psyche where the real solution lies and where religion dominates the landscape. I feel it is essential to illuminate the despotic tendency of fundamentalists not necessarily by confronting or denying them in the psyche, but by simply revealing there is a much bigger sea we are swimming in, and thus undermining their "exclusive" claims to the territory. The mind seeks order, and their manipulative and hypocritical ways will fall into disfavor when we undermine their biggest tool: fear.

This construct that the mind seeks and needs to serve the heart I call the Primacy of Love. I feel it is so foundational to our being that it can be described as the physical expression of Natural Law, the very foundation of this country acknowledged in the first sentence of its declaration of independence. That by illuminating the real interaction between the psyche, (of the mind) and the physical world (embodied by the mind in its awareness of the heart – a sentient node that by its physicality cannot be persuaded from its commitment to life and the desire for it) we give the mind both the freedom to explore any depth of thought and provide it concrete assurances that its purpose is linked to and based upon a logical, valid, immutable and universal value.

This is the role traditionally played in the psyche by religion, and myth; frameworks with foundations kept just vague enough by the cloak of mystery that solid explanations can never be nailed down. These frameworks are absolutes that exist only in the mind that cannot be changed by the mind. Therein lies the stability of mind and culture.

Unfortunately in our current climate the absolutes have been stripped of their mystery by relentless examination, undermined by the impatient dismissals of cynicism, and have become unconvincing. Only the steadfastly faithful hold there – it is a rock in the psyche, but the defense of fundamentalist doctrine eventually dissolves as something not factual.

Wherein the Primacy of Love has a universally represented physical example in tandem with each mind, and the description of God from any religion can be held vouchsafe upon it.

Religion and Nationalism have always provided the framework for the myth, and as such took on the stewardship of the minds that relied on it. These proxies are now asked to relinquish authority to the Primacy of Love, allowing each mind to be individual in its judgments yet linked in understanding of cultural values as in a hive.

I feel that every community, every person, inherently recognizes without need for description these values and should be made free to live within them. These values are not described as supplanting religion, or nationalism, but as illuminating the valid principles within them.

We have reached a time of man, and the world knows it, that our universal cooperation is both necessary for the health of this planet and our existence upon it, and the culmination of the hopes of every generation that has lived before us. Choose well.