One x One = Someone; One x Nothing = Nobody

Two things to clarify. First, as I mentioned in a comment, it's not the blogging that is a burnout, it's the attempt to do it in the context of all my other responsibilities. In fact, I wish I could earn a living from being a writer, instead of doing it as a hobby. But I also realize that if that were to somehow happen, it would mean that something had gone terribly wrong. I don't want to write for the idiot masses. I have no need to imagine that I am a Big Somebody just because a bunch of Nobodies fantasize that I am one.

This may sound "elitist," but that is not at all the point. For example, Deepak Chopra is appalling enough. But try sampling the kinds of deeply moronic and psychologically deranged comments he generates on his site, and see the quality of person who is attracted to him. It is a cesspool of ignorance, superstition, intellectual sloth, and a smug, passive-aggressive hatred of normality. If I actually attracted readers of that caliber, I couldn't live with myself.

It's the same with someone like Ken Wilber. As intelligent as he may or may not be at this point in his life -- it seems to me that he lost his fastball over a decade ago -- he surrounds himself with a cult of dullards and mediocrities, which I suppose one must do if one is going to try to make a living off this racket. I would never want to be placed in a position of being beholden to the marketplace, and then have to tolerate the annoying presence of all these boobs in order to sell my books.

It's not that I have any special animus for morons, unless they're getting in my way. Plus, I want to write for spiritual adults, not lead some kind of new age children's crusade. The last thing I want is for a bunch of adultolescents to generate a mass transference on me, as if I am the transmitter instead of a mere lightning rod. I want everyone to be a lightning rod and have their own lightning blog, like Robin, Walt, Rick, Van, and the rest of you.

Sri Aurobindo expressed it well, when he wrote in a letter that "I do not readily accept disciples, as this path of Yoga is a difficult one and can be followed only if there is a special call." In another letter he balked at the notion of trying to create some kind of mass movement, because "For serious work it is a poison.... a movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence."

Bear in mind that Aurobindo had a sly sense of humor, and that he wasn't saying this in bitterness or anger. Rather, he was just highlighting the banal reality of the situation. Look at it this way: many people call themselves Raccoons, but Petey will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye crypto-new age troll.

Importantly, no one is excluded. But it's like playing in the NBA: You've got to have game. Feel free to join in, but the instant you drive down the lane with some cliche or pompous platitude, don't be surprised if you are fouled hard. This is my house, so don't bring that weak sh*t to the bucket, or you will be posterized.

The brilliant Mark Perry -- who is just a tad too... fascist for my taste -- nevertheless expresses it well. Along with Schuon, he feels that we have entered the "Kali Yuga," signifying the outer limit of the cosmic descent, when stupidity and evil shall reign. I don't agree with that. I do, however, agree with Dennis Prager that, for a variety of less occult reasons, we live in an "age of stupidity" which affects the secular and religious alike.

At any rate, Perry writes that in this age of egalitarian relativism, "it is rare, if not impossible, for truly truly superior individuals" to "rise to the public prominence their stamp would normally secure for them because, in a regime where mass numbers prevail, they must constantly defer to -- and be held accountable -- to swarms of inferiors who cannot possibly understand them and who assume everyone is exactly like them because they have no real understanding of what a being with a noble heart is."

As a result, a true demo-cracy -- which the United States was never intended to be -- "by dignifying numbers, sentences the superior 'one' to the station of a wandering outcast. Or, by exalting quantity (which can never be intelligent) abolishes quality (which can never be 'many'...)."

This is a subtle point, but Perry points out that all numbers are simply multiples of One, so that if one removes the unique, "the rest is pulverized, because the many can only derive their reality from the One, never the other way around, as the proponents of pluralism [and relativism, I might add] propose." This regressive and degenerative process cannot help but to go backward, as it sunders itself from the true singular authority to which we must bow down in order to be men. Or to be anything, for that matter.

One wonders: to whom does Bill Maher bow down? If the answer is no one and nothing, then it means that he worships himself. As if we didn't know that. And a man who is is own god has an idiot for a worshipper.

Now, this would be a pretty pathetic and impoverished cosmos if there weren't beings before whom I spontaneously bow down and to whom I look up. In other words, recognition of hierarchy -- and the archetypal qualities it embodies -- is the essence of the human station.

A man without reverence for the sacred is not a man at all. Rather, he makes himself a god, and therefore a devil. A society of such pseudo-individuals will therefore be a society well on its way to hell. And remember, as "unique" or "edgy" as they may seem, it can only be a caricature of individuality, since true uniqueness can only be derived from the One, for whom every hair on your head is counted. That's how unique you are.

Bill Maher is such a moron. I can't wait to review his idiotic film attacking religion and extolling his own religion of auto-fellatio. I saw a clip on You Tube the other day, in which he heaps praise upon Roseanne Barr for her courageous transgressions of taste, decency, intelligence, and sanity. As he put it, the world needs people like Barr, because if you don't cross the line, you don't know where it is. As if these people care about the boundaries that define humanness, or would even recognize them if they tripped on them! Or as if they cannot help compulsively rebelling against boundaries, because they are either fixated adolescents or borderline personalities. These people don't really exist. They only seem to. They are just a bundle of reactions.

The point is, they wish to destroy the boundaries that define the human in order to justify their own quasi-animal existence. Remember, to name something is synonymous with existence. To give a name means to both recognize and confer boundaries. There is such a thing as the human being. But only if it is derived from the One.