"Human Development and Ultimate Reality" is a chapter invited as commentary on Tarthan Tulku's adaptation of Tibetan Dzogchen for Westerners, called, "Time, Space, and Knowledge" (TSK, 1977). 

The thrust of the commentary is to propose and explore an alternative to the mainstream step-stage-level model of development that proceeds sequentially.

I suggest that close observing reveals that we develop by repeatedly returning to the "whence" of any further manifesting, what is beyond being transcended in some new next level, the ultimate, energetically fertile ground of our existence, and the "from which" any next step, or stage, or level emerges.

I offer as data to support this alternative by drawing on TSK's experiential and phenomenological precision to show how to appreciate by discovering for oneself that the "gap" known in meditation and "the shift" known to therapy and transformational processes, coincide as both "open," and further inquiry into such opening blazes a path on which "opening opens to the openness it opens to." 

Several decades would have to pass of considerly more contemplative study before I could relate this curious phrasing with wider currents -- to include the toroidal, self-co-creative expression of all energy field from quantum to cosmos, and the recursive logic of so many expressions of revealed truth -  as above so below, giving is receiving, whatever goes around comes around, I am that I am.
 
See "Harmonize All of You with All" for more extended exploring and discussion on this theme.

 Officially, the Vietnam War is over, but it still goes on in American minds. The battle lines are so ingrained that we play out the old conflicts without noticing the consequences. Some of the war's after-effects are obvious.

Take the men who fought in Vietnam, for example. A study that was mandated by the Congress (and released in March) and was based on interviews with a random sample of 1,400 men who came of age during the Vietnam era provided a systematic comparison between veterans and nonveterans. On the average, today those who served in Vietnam have less education and lower-status jobs than other men of the same age and background. Among veterans with Vietnam service, those who saw heavy combat are more likely to use alcohol and drugs, to have criminal records, and to suffer from medical problems and stressrelated symptoms. As a rough estimate, half of the nearly three million men who served in Vietnam are still burdened by unresolved war experiences.

Why do these problems persist? The answer most often ignored is that the conflicts that burden many ex-servicemen are ones that continue here at home. During the war years, veterans' difficulties increased with the mounting controversy. Factionalism rooted in the Vietnam era still seethes, though now it is mostly beneath the surface. Americans have yet to see that veterans' problems, while serious enough in their own right, are symptomatic of a historic dilemma that faces the country as a whole.

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The first goal in this clinical and theoretical essay is to specify what it means to hear people through their pain, by articulating intuitions that are seldom put in formal terms. “What” and “how” and “whom” we hear shift depending on whether we are (1) uncovering the facts, (2) appreciating their meaning with another's life, (3) drawing out and enlivening the one who has to live with and make sense of traumatic experience, or (4) engendering, by having others hear that they are heard, enough relatedness to establish a meaningful precedent for their lives.

A second goal here is to show how the meaning of trauma changes as hearing deepens. Accordingly, we may hear in people's trauma (1) psychophysical reactions to events; (2) the playing out of themes from a lifetime; (3) violations whose inner message is a demand to awaken beyond self-protective ways of being; and (4) a uniquely powerful opening for communion.

   “Healing from the War” distills and blends the learning, research, clinical efforts, and revelations of my first 15 years after coming from the Vietnam War, into a series of 8 chapters.
These include personal sharing, vignettes from counseling other veterans, citations from the national study I did, along with references to ideas in psychology, philosophy, history and spiritual practices.
These 8 themes are offered as facets of healing as I have experienced and observed, not a lock-step sequence:
Coming Back, Retracing Steps, Getting Involved, Digging Inside, Reaching Bottom, Turning It Around, Mastering Everyday Live, and Transforming Warriors.
A generation after it was published in 1985 and won a Christopher Award announced in the NY Times for “affirming the highest human values,” Lily Casura, founder of the Healingcombattrauma.com website after the Iraq invasion, called “Healing from the War” her “hands down fav.”

   For my 2022 book, here is a 5-star review posted on Amazon by Sheri Herndon:

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