The first two years after Vietnam combat were lived in a daze of irreconcilable realities. In trying to live the American Dream and embrace the common wisdom principles that attended the realization of that dream: a good education, hard work, competitive excellence, and a well-paying career, I kept finding myself at cross-purposes. While abstractly

internalizing all of that as a personal path, I was actually pursuing needed decompression from the subjective eternality of the travail and requiem of ground-war reality. The haunting of that challenged the simplicity of reducing life to those few considerations.

I had figuratively jettisoned the experience of Vietnam for living in the present, but Vietnam insinuated that the present as a collective notion of reality was incomplete. I eventually expanded my big-picture concept of reality through Yoga, Eckankar, and other self-realization/mystical paths, but in so doing, I inadvertently removed Vietnam and my Vietnam-self from its proper place in my personal history, experience, and awareness-expanding process.

The irony of adopting the “big picture” is the tendency to minimize its true bigness by casting aside perceived wrong view naiveté and missing the depth and significance of the big view that you thought you were too small to see. In casting aside attachment to form, all the teachings and teachers to some extent replace forms of one kind (negative) for forms of another (positive). We become conditioned to good dogma over bad dogma. This linear approach to replacing past ignorance with new enlightened awareness divides our experiences in time and space into compartments for shredding and for filing. But life, existence is a circle. It’s all the "big picture;” it’s all worth filing for reflection, for continued learning.

The NOW contains before and after – a circle to orbit from the vantage point of the present moment. Only then do we liberate ourselves from dogma. Liberation is an all-inclusive circle.