Traveling to a New America - New Stops in California

EL CERRITO, Calif. - Oct. 18, 2016 - PRLog -- A New Vision of Ourselves.  A New Dream of America.  A New Religion for the World.

Traveling to a New America - a campaign by author James Hilgendorf to carry a new vision of life in America to towns and cities across the United States - recently stopped at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the campus of the University of California in Davis, California.

Hilgendorf is a filmmaker, speaker, poet, and the author of ten non-fiction books that are opening the way to a new vision of ourselves, a new dream of America, a new religion for the world.

The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco - a beautiful structure - was originally built to exhibit works of art, as part of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

The Exposition – a world's fair – was held to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal; but it was also an opportunity for the city of San Francisco to showcase its recovery from the devastating earthquake of 1906.

This was an era of industrialization, and world's fairs proudly displayed the latest advances in science and technology.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the First World War was underway, and only two years after the 1915 Exposition in San Francisco, the United States was drawn into the War, which ended in 1918 only after the War had produced seventeen million deaths and and additional twenty million wounded.

Only some twenty-plus years later, we entered another World War, this one truly a global war, which ended with over sixty million dead, and countless others wounded.

Meanwhile, technology and science have continued to grow at a phenomenal rate, and other wars and nuclear confrontations are threatening.

As he travels, Hilgendorf asks people - especially young people - what they think about America - with its divisiveness and seeming political chaos - and about the world in general.

One young man had this to say:

"I think something much deeper is going on.  The ways we live are tribal. Our politics, our religions are tribal in nature, they separate us, their visions are not big enough to include all of us.  You're either one or the other, and if you're the other, you're the outsider, the enemy almost.  I don't think we're going to bring this country, or this world for that matter, together until we find a new spiritual foundation almost for our lives, one that includes everyone.  We're moving towards a globalized world, but we don't have the spiritual vision yet to go with that movement."

On the University of California campus in Davis, he heard this comment from a young graduate student, originally from Brazil:

"I feel that what is happening in my own country is symptomatic of what is happening in many countries around the world.  In Brazil, a conservative right wing is taking over all over the country.  This conservative trend seems to be developing in other countries also.  In the United States, especially in this presidential election, you see a movement, on the Republican side, that is giving a loud and public voice to suppressed feelings that once were submerged – feelings that before were not considered defensible or nice to air in public, but which now are being publicly and shamelessly aired.   Feelings and expressions of rage and violence from people who in one way or another consider themselves unrecognized and left behind."

Hilgendorf is a Buddhist, having practiced Buddhism for forty-four years with the Soka Gakkai International, the largest Buddhist lay organization in the world now, with 12,000,000 members in 192 countries and territories around the globe.

In his talks he tries to awaken people to the tremendous potential they have within their lives.

"It's a new world," Hilgendorf says. "Science itself, ever since the advent of quantum physics has been telling us we no longer live in a classically defined world.  This is a quantum world.  And our mainline religions are unable to help us cope with the enlarged vision of our world and our universe.  We are interconnected with each other in profound ways, interconnected with the greater universe itself."

One of Hilgendorf's books is "Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective", of which one reviewer wrote:

"If I were to teach a basic college-level course in religion, philosophy, or metaphysics - call it Spirituality 101 - this book would be required reading.  In fact, it would be the first week's assignment.  Having read all or parts of nearly a thousand books dealing with spiritual matters, I cannot recall another that so simply and effectively blends the fundamentals of religion and science." - Michael E. Tymn, Journal of Religion and Psychical Research.

James Hilgendorf's website is at http://www.jameshilgendorf.org

You can follow his "Traveling to a New America" campaign on his Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/NewDreamOfAmerica