A Hard Day's Blog

I think I might be a little burned out. Just a vague sense that "there's not enough coffee," combined with the thought that we've pretty much covered the cosmic weirderfount, in concert with the realization that no one cares anyway. Well, boo freaking hoodoo.

You have to understand that if my mind is infected by the slightest concern that I have so few readers, I'm a goner. It's like being a soldier and realizing you could get shot, or being a baseball player and realizing you could get beaned. You can't think about those things, because doing so only interferes with what one needs to do to ensure they don't happen. I just need to do what I do, and forget about the results. You know, karma yoga. Or, as Krishna said to Arjuna, "gita life, buddhi."

Now that I think about it, it is interesting that I get a huge spike in readership whenever I join in the Tempest of the Day and toss some red meat into the fray. This tells me that I could be a very popular fellow if I simply reeled off one of those piece-of-my-mind pieces every day. I wonder what goes through the mind of someone who stumbles upon one of those rants, then returns the next day for more, only to find a discussion of the ontological status of the Lie, or some transrational nuggets of joy from Petey? Whatever it is, they don't come back after that.

But being more popular wouldn't help anyway, and would probably only interfere with the process. Even as it is, it takes a lot of self-discipline to not write for an audience -- or even for myself, for that matter -- but to simply write what comes up... or down. Again, the moment I start to think about a "target," I miss the mark. Total spontaneity. First thought, best thought. Suspend memory, desire, understanding. Mind jazz. If you fluff a note, there are no second takes or redubbing. You have to find a way to resolve it into a higher unity.

I guess it concerns me a little that I think we have something vital to add to the "national conversation," but that there is no point of entry for our views. People for whom I have a great deal of respect might very well be embarrassed to be seen with me. Take, for example, some of the bigger conservative blogs -- PowerLine, NRO, American Thinker. PowerLine is completely rationalistic and legalistic, and would have no use for a mystical point of view. NRO is traditionally Catholic, and would be deeply suspicious if not hostile to my approach.

In fact, National Review once published a letter of mine. It was after the death of George Harrison in 2001, and they had printed what I felt was a rather snarky and ungracious obituary of him, merely because he embraced Eastern religion. I wish I had kept a copy, but the letter had something to do with the parallels between the great sages and seers of India and the saints and mystics of the Catholic church. Interestingly, in my letter, they deleted the word "mystics," which I think is very telling. Saints are okay. Mystics need not apply. But in so doing, you eliminate the blood from the body -- luminaries such as Meister Eckhart, Denys the Areopagite, John Scottus Eriugena, etc. Furthermore, you cede that whole ground to the irrational left, who do indeed drag the supralogical down to the illogocal, as evidenced by the sociopathic likes of a Deepak Chopra and all the rest of the phony gurus.

Obviously the reality of the mystical holds a permanent appeal for human beings, as it is nothing less than a call from home. This is precisely why these sociopaths of the left are able to exploit it, because people will be drawn to counterfeit versions if the real thing is unavailable. If you ban classical music, people will still crave music. In fact, look at what happens, say, in the Islamic world, where truth is effectively banned. There is still no shortage of "intellectuals," except that they are unable to entertain truth. Rather, they simply elaborate lies with the thinking mind.

We are very close to the having that same kind of mass pathology in our liberal universities, which are filled with thinkers but precious little truth or wisdom. It cannot be emphasized enough that the more intelligent the person, the more likely they are to have been indoctrinated by the system. After all, the liberal educational establishment pre-selects for the intelligent, so it should come as no surprise that they are the most brainwashed. But there is no correlation whatsoever between intelligence and wisdom, let alone decency.

I don't have to look any further than my own debased field of psychology to see the soul pathology. I would guess that 90% of clinical psychologists are left/liberal. As a result, there is no end to the lies they embrace and propagate, but which they call "sophistication" or "enlightenment." The whole field is sophocating under a blanket of political correctness. I wouldn't even try to add my voice, because it would be a full time job defending oneself from the vicious attacks that would ensue.

American Thinker occasionally has a religious piece, but again, it is always within the realm of a perhaps slightly intellectualized but nevertheless completely exoteric religiosity that can't really stand up to the light of the intellect, or Mind of Light. They just have to pretend there is no conflict between conservative rationalism and religious irrationalism. Not that exoteric religion is necessarily irrational, only that it requires an illuminated intellect to understand precisely why it isn't.

Furthermore, without that deeper understanding to anchor it, then religion can easily fall prey to a rank irrationalism that the left never stops exploiting. In other words, if you do not understand the sharp distinctions between the logical, illogical, and supralogical, then one way or the other you will end up promoting illogic. Just as a reasonable scientist becomes unreasonable the moment he believes that reason alone is sufficient to disclose the Real, the religious person becomes infralogical the moment he abandons the supralogical (or fails to ever even ascend there).

I suppose that's what troubles me, because it really is like starting a new movement from the ground up. While we have allies, our differences with those allies are very sharp. On the one hand, we share no values whatsoever with the diabolical left, which embodies all of the anti-Divine and anti-evolutionary cosmic forces. But on the other hand, there is only a partial intersection with conservatism, being that they talk about things like virtue and truth, but again in a very limited way that doesn't draw out their cosmic implications in a totally consistent manner. And forget about the Republican Party, which at best serves as an occasional brake on the worst depredations of the illiberal left. They are an embarrassment.

Really, even the most sensibly religious conservatives, such as Dennis Prager, stop halfway. He's another example of someone for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration, but I am quite sure he would be "tone deaf" to my approach. A lot of conservatives -- precisely because they are guided by logic and not emotion -- are suspicious of realities that transcend the logical plane. From their point of view, mysticism looks like mystification and mystagogy.

This may or may not be relevant, but a friend of mine, who is a Beatles fanatic, just returned from a trip to England. While in London, he visited several of the locations where the film A Hard Day's Night was shot. He wrote to me that "as we have discussed, there is a mythological quality about that movie.... partly because it's in black and white.... and these locations that are so familiar are interesting to see in real life. Although, they're never as good as the image you have from the film."

He is definitely not what you would call a Raccoon, but I'm always working on him, since I can't not be me. I wrote back to him that he was merely confirming the fact that what we call the "real world" is actually a lower dimensional declension from the mythological world. But "mythological" is not really a good word, since it has taken on too many negative connotations, as if mythological means "unreal" or "fantasy." But all spiritual metaphysics agree that the material world is merely the epidermis or "outer" layer of reality. It's the last step before nothingness. So A Hard Day's Night -- or any great work of art -- is more real than its subject.

Hmm, he just wrote me back. Let's see if I got through to him. If I did, perhaps there is hope for the world after all:

"I love your take on the 'real' world... versus the one depicted in A Hard Day's Night. As a kid, that world I saw in the movie was so supercharged with life and energy... and yet there's really NOTHING notable about those actual locations. So, what we think of as 'reality'... the riverbank, the train station, are really just small slivers of what's ACTUALLY happening (if I read you right).

"So... to extend the thought, I think one of the keys in life is to somehow burrow under that boring outer layer of reality, and get to the good stuff... where the magic and the mystery happens."

By jove, I think he's got it!