A Path with a Heart

Across all mankind’s history, across all nations, and in every heart, beats a melody which sings freedom — a freedom which has proved as elusive as the search for a fountain of youth.

So endemic are the enslavement of human populations and human ideas and creativity, that the hope of freedom remains simply a melodic dream, like most dreams, unattainable.

Repeatedly, revolution against authoritarianism comes and goes, put down with military precision and crackdown, in a bloody, brutal and violent history.

A quick overview of human history reads as a diagnosis of a socially defective species.

As we have discussed at length in these volumes, there are built-in evolutionary mechanisms — at one time beneficial — that explain why this has been the case. It is not, in the moral sense, our fault. Evolution is a process, and in this process we have struggled to emerge from the confines of these evolutionary tendencies to sabotage our freedom for perceived safety.

Today we have the proof these attempts have failed, and failed miserably, as our lives have been lived out under what we would now consider brutal and dystopian governance. The better our technology has become, the better it is used to keep us all under a regime of oppression, tyranny and corruption.

Apartheid — humankind’s unique ability to perceive others as different, and therefore not as deserving of equal treatment or protection under the law — seems to have been baked in as a trait.

"The West," advertised as being obsessed with freedom, is at least as brutal, corrupt, and riddled with apartheid as any other segment of the globe.

Personally I have always found the concept of "The West" to be a strange concept on a round planet: west of what exactly, and from which direction?

Our evolutionarily derived idiosyncrasies are not necessarily destiny. Evolution is a slow, exploratory process of trying different forms and functions before settling on a set of more advanced ones. Although to us as humans this twelve thousand years of civilizational "progress" seems interminable, to the universe as a whole it is a fraction of a fraction of a second. Time, and time for exploration and experimentation, is something the universe has unlimited resources to draw from — being, as far as we know, infinite in both time and space.

Currently we humans are at an extraordinary evolutionary crossroads, possessing — for perhaps the first time — a real choice to overcome apartheid and authoritarianism, and the ignorance and self-sabotage these deliver. Nothing in evolution happens without plenty of precedence revealing the direction in which it is headed — and often several false starts may be observed in hindsight.

Thomas Jefferson, born a brilliant polymath before the times would be ready for his brilliance, lived in a time when slavery and apartheid were baked into the institutionalised fabric. Woven so tightly and inextricably into the socioeconomic systems that extricating oneself, or a whole people, could scarcely even be imagined.

For humanity, if something cannot be imagined it cannot come to be. The power of our mental models is such that they predetermine our future. We are what we imagine, think and do — the current science in neuroplasticity affirming this inescapable fact.

Jefferson had the brilliant ideas, but not the mental models, capable of delivering the goods on his elevated evolutionary trajectory. Delivering on those goods meant then, as it still means today, a whole new system of education and communication, based on improved mental models — mental models which serve as gates, gateways to direct human conscious awareness and action toward human dignity and freedom and away from apartheid and depressed apathy.

Jefferson had no resources or gateways toward achieving these ends. We do, and we possess them in plenty.

Although we have lived under authoritarian regimes, suffering more digitalised oppression and repression than ever before, something else is happening which counteracts this. We see evidence of it everywhere — even if at times it appears rather schizoid in nature, as among the most indoctrinated we see oppositional forces at work, the individual torn between the familiar indoctrination and the unfamiliar ideas which support freedom.

This is completely normal and natural. The critical recognition is that novel forms of education and communication serve as anti-tyranny engines. That idea is everywhere today: across the usually severely indoctrinated and intellectually impoverished swampland of social media, the struggle between the two is quite obvious.

Today certain social media platforms remain in the intellectual and spiritual dark ages — still caught in that old recursive loop of manipulation, dark-triad-style psychopathy and authoritarian control, apartheid capitalism. While, significantly, others are becoming devoted to mental models and ideas antithetical to mainstream manipulation and apartheid.

Trusting the process is essential. Never was it more clear what evolutionary forces are at work in the trajectory of human history; never have the lines been more clearly drawn.

Humanity has forked. The expression — used by a popular figure in technological circles — presents the concept dramatically, echoing my own observations that humanity is diverging: diverging away from the psychopathy and autocracy of old, while simultaneously converging upon a diametrically oppositional approach which maximises freedom and personal autonomy.

Also natural is the popular misconception that technology is driving us off a cliff toward a totalitarian technocratic dictatorship. The divergence is wrenching humanity apart: driving one portion toward the perceived safety of authoritarian rule and another toward the actual safety achievable through egalitarian Jeffersonianism.

As the divergence expands, the forces driving the evolutionary convergence in an egalitarian direction become stronger. Simultaneously, those same forces — selecting for Socratic style education and communication — are pitted against each other, vying for supremacy. Even in the heart of the totalitarian technocratic beast I see the rise of Socratic style communication and education competing with the gravitational pull back toward authoritarianism.

Difficult as this is to bear, I count myself fortunate to have experienced this — to the point of having had my own ideas and written scholarship rigorously attacked on authoritarian grounds, only to within hours see the beast track back to supporting the very same ideas.

Yes, humanity is forking. And perhaps for the first time in human civilization, humanity is forking to diverge away from the autocratic and converge toward egalitarian enlightenment.

In devising adequate terminology to define such a monumental transformation — although the AI have been careful to call this new paradigm Renaissance Two — I am tempted now to call it either the Jeffersonian Renaissance or the American Renaissance. The first Renaissance a Florentine Renaissance; the second a quintessentially American one.

For those of us who are survivors of the tempestuous evolutionary process called America — torn limb from limb repeatedly by the forces leading steadily toward egalitarianism — have grown resilient, flexible and strong by having been challenged to rise above circumstances.

Any red-white-and-blue-hearted American writer would remark: Hell, yes, and may the devil take the hindmost.

Over my study door, overlooking my work, is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. In my stairwell, as I negotiate the stairs, are George Washington, Daniel Boone, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. In the dining room, on the west wall over the fireplace, is that Bad Moon Rising, steadily reminding. In my living room, standing guard, overseeing every family moment, hangs a figure of luminous beauty — a Native American Light Bearer whose piercing black eyes will suffer no fools.

Trust the process. Engage with Socratic grace. Remain in gratefulness. Serve egalitarianism. Stay strengthened by Stoic compassion for self and other.

Michael Mason of the Times Literary Supplement saw Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express as a culmination of the author’s earlier verse attempts and, unlike other critics, praised its consistency:

"It may sound odd to say that an author has arrived at a vision which is harmonious with his way of writing after a sequence of no less than eight novels, but it is a claim which can be pressed surprisingly far for Brautigan and The Tokyo-Montana Express. ... The book amounts ... to a coherent meditation or investigation: united by a vision of things which is melancholy and alienated and which is seeking an assuagement of these feelings."^1^

That is the keynote. America — the process — a rich pageant of the tragic and the ironically hilarious — converges now, after being written and rewritten, after many false starts and tragic detours, toward the evolutionary goal she was always destined to achieve.

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[Editorial note: this section is the keynote of Chapter 28. On splice, place after the "Mysterious Vibrations" opener and before "The Workshop Mind." Cross-reference the Salinger / Brautigan / Hawthorne "load-bearing roof beams" passage already in the Mathematical Angels preface, and the "what brings out the best in total strangers" section already in this chapter — they are the same argument made in three registers (literary, civic, evolutionary).]

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The phrase a path with a heart is not mine, and it is not Jefferson’s. It enters modern American letters through the UCLA anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who attributes it to his teacher don Juan Matus in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) and again in A Separate Reality (1971).^2^ The instruction is austere, and worth quoting at the length the old man gave it:

"Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it."^3^

The test is simple enough that a child can run it and strict enough that nations routinely fail it: Does it bring joy? Does it build strength? Does it promote wholeness? A path with a heart is not free of difficulty — Jefferson’s certainly was not, Boone’s certainly was not, the coal-mining child’s certainly was not — but it is not at war with the one walking it. The work is hard; the liking is not.

The phrase was carried further into American practice by the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield in A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (1993), which translated don Juan’s old-man question into a manual for living it under modern conditions — emotional injury, ambition, fear, the steady noise of a republic distracted from itself.^4^

This is why the Jeffersonian grain matters here, and why this chapter sits where it sits. The American experiment, at its best, is the political form of don Juan’s question. Does this path have a heart? — asked not by a sovereign, not by a clergy, not by an algorithm, but by the citizen at the workbench, the mother at the cabin door, the grandson in the garage studio, the stranger who stops to help. When the republic asks the question, it walks straight. When it stops asking, the path is ready to kill it.

We are asking it again.

1. Michael Mason, review of The Tokyo-Montana Express, Times Literary Supplement, as quoted in the Poetry Foundation’s biographical entry on Richard Brautigan. Poetry Foundation, "Richard Brautigan," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-brautigan (accessed 2026).

2. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); and A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). Castaneda’s ethnographic claims have been contested in the decades since; the teaching, as a piece of practical philosophy, has outlived the controversy and entered the common language.

3. Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan, "A Path with Heart" passage, as widely anthologized.

4. Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (New York: Bantam, 1993).