In effect, there are hidden tribes of youth today who hone their selfhood as a tool of survival, as a shield to survive the socialization of school. When schools function as fueling stations for values, pumping empty tanks full of prescribed virtue, young people are rarely allowed to explore their deep tendency to Unity. In truth, many teachers and administrators operate like pilgrims turned spies, rarely showing who they really are. In actuality, the role models in schools, very often, are simply those who hide more effectively, who survive more discreetly.

Carl Jung in the 1950s warned that the West is slowly living a deadly paradox; that while American society admires the rugged individual and can’t exist without the individual, the monolith of our society has only one appetite, to eliminate the individual. We are creating a misanthropic beast that despises itself.

Yet if these things are true, our task is as grave for ourselves as for our society: to restore our trust and usefulness without being crushed. But how? During the Tang Dynasty, Lu Yen, more commonly known as Ancestor Lu, believed that:

The Tao is entered by way of sincerity . . .

Before practicing the art of immortality,

first practice the art of humanity.

But what does it mean to be sincere, if not first-hand in all contact with the world, if not shield-free, mask-free, veil-free. Indeed, to be sincere is to strive for nothing to exist between inner and outer. Needless to say, this requires courage and compassion. And to enlist these qualities we are brought back to the resurrection of trust. As I write these lines, I can see my Grandmother’s face the last time I saw her. She was ninety-four and could barely breathe, and as I left, as she thought me gone, I paused in the hall and caught one last glimpse when she thought no one was looking. And in that moment I could tell by her century-old face, she was a soft membrane thinning between inner and outer seas. More than ever, her face was full of trust. She opened her neck to God and closed her eyes.

As Lu affirms, it’s through this kind of sincerity and trust that people can

make the extent of their minds reach everywhere and encompass everything, so that all living creatures are embraced within the mind of the individual.

Like a ribbon of wind that gusts and circles the smallest leaf, all rests on this immeasurable thinness called sincerity. And in order to grow useful, which is not always synonymous with being productive, we somehow must discover our true place, not as instructed by others, but as uncovered by the litmus of our own uncorrupted sincerity. As the psychologist Rollo May asserts,

Anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.