This Memorial Day, 2011, having come full circle in my life, having taken Vietnam off the dust-collected shelves of a buried past, and placed it on the mantle of the present—honoring it as an indispensable epoch toward the road less traveled and enlightened consciousness—I reflect on the experiences amassed, the lessons learned, and the hard-earned wisdom gained.

Through the smoke, dust, and pouring rain, the blood sacrifices of war; through the aftermath of discontent that followed, I have arrived at spiritual stasis.

Life is always a balancing of war with peace—reconciling passivity with aggression. It is in reconciling these opposite poles within ourselves that we achieve the inner symbiosis needed to be in balance with life’s energetics of action and reaction. This is the mystical side of war and peace, where the mystical warrior is centered neither for nor against anything, yet acts in defense of life for its continuation.

In reflecting on this day, set aside to honor war dead, I recall the words of Warrior in my book, Sitting with Warrior:

Beyond the physical universe, beyond the cosmos, there is life. Beyond religion and science, rationality and mysticism, there is life. Beyond the heavens and hells, gods and goddesses, angels and demons, there is life. Beyond the dreaming of life and the dream of life, there is life.

War is the rage of life, burning in a wildfire of mistaken identity, madly consuming all vestiges of human difference. In the identicalness of humanity’s ashes, you see that you have killed only yourselves. In reality, every icon, every statue, every painting, every symbol and image erected to honor war dead is, at its most fundamental level, a recognition of sameness. War’s spirit level clearly shows that no matter how plumb the incline of human variation, there is but one ultimate inner-species driving itself toward perfection.

From the ashes of war’s dead, you rise in an ever-forward march toward the ultimate conclusion of your long stupefaction. The tombstones all over the world silently declare one humanity in the ultimate struggle with itself. The irony of the names etched upon all the walls, all the gravestones, all the monuments, all the edifices of remembrance in all the different languages, is that the struggle for which “these honored dead”—to quote Lincoln— . . . “gave the last full measure of devotion” is to be liberated from the illusion of separation. That Hoagland and all those guys ”shall not have died in vain,” humankind must complete the journey that they instinctually dedicated themselves to.”

Carl