Spiritual but not Religious, Good and Hard

Warning: intolerably self-indulgent me-meandering below. Best I can do is hope it's mildly amusing and start over tomorrow.

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One problem, I suppose (continuing with yesterday's subject) is that there can be no fixed method for discovering the undiscovered, since this happens in all sorts of ways, sometimes even when we’re asleep, as in Kekulé's dream about the structure of benzene, or Einstein’s about sledding at the speed of light. 

Few -- okay, none -- of my brainwaves occur when I’m thinking, rather, when I’m not. They just pop into my noggin, and it’s up to me to write them down, otherwise they’re as enduring as passing clouds.

But this begs the question of who is doing the thinking when we're not. Not to go all romantic on you this early in the morning, but this was one of the central ideas of all those 19th century fruitcakes, from Emerson to Blavatsky. 

In fact, I just read a highly entertaining book on the subject, called The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898, by Dominic Green. Whoever he is, he is insanely erudite. Nor can you really tell where he’s coming from, since he pokes fun of everyone in a way so dry it made my lips hurt real bad! (https://www.amazon.com/Religious-Revolution-Modern-Spirituality-1848-1898/dp/0374248834/ref=sr_1_1?crid=29G418AG56F1J&keywords=dominic+green&qid=1668544484&s=books&sprefix=dominic+green%2Cstripbooks%2C147&sr=1-1.)

Never does he hit the reader over the head with it, but the period of time discussed in the book is when we in the west not only underwent a great religious revolution, but are still very much in the mydst of it. Not only is it the fount of our deeply retarded New Age movement, but it is ground zero of the whole spiritual-but-not-religious mindset that is to the intellect what art was to Andy Warhol: whatever you can get away with.

Having said that, I won’t deny that I myself once dabbled in the new age. In time this led to dallying, trifling, and even fribbling with it, but always in the larger context of screwing around in general, which continues to this day and this post. 

Contrary to what most conservatives believe, there was an upside to the ‘60s, and someday we might even find it. Meanwhile, what can I do? I was a child in the ‘60s, meaning that more than a little of the retardedness rubbed off on me. If you call me a conservative hippy you wouldn’t be wrong. 

Yesterday I alluded to that time my mind switched on and was suddenly hungry for nourishment. Not only was my head essentially empty of content, it was entirely void of little things like prudence, temperance, or wisdom. 

Later in the day I remembered this guy I used to listen to on the radio in the middle of the night, when I was working the graveyard shift in the supermarket, named Michael Benner. This got me to wondering what ever happened to him. How to find out? I know: google! Not only is he still around, he published a book a few years ago called Fearless Intelligence, even though he's not a homosexual (https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Intelligence-Extraordinary-Wisdom-Awareness/dp/1543942490/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3SMI1OYOD4PTH&keywords=michael+benner&qid=1668544449&s=books&sprefix=michael%2520benner%2Cstripbooks%2C144&sr=1-1).

It’s so retarded I won’t even. In a market crowded with cringe-inducing platitudes, this one can compete with anyone. My point isn’t to bag on him, only to acknowledge that back in the early ‘80s I was actually susceptible to this BS. One thing that’s curious is that he hasn’t evolved one bit since then, whereas I literally can’t remember what it was like to be so retarded. 

What happened? In other words, there’s a kind of nonlinearity going on here, for how does one account for this kind of leap? They say nature makes no leaps. But this doesn’t mean there are no leaps. Nor that nature has the last word.

Now, I don't want to make this post about me, except insofar as doing so exemplifies a larger principle we need to look into. At any rate, soon enough I left the likes of Benner behind, but he did provoke an interest in psychology that eventually resulted in a license to practice it. 

But a PhD in psychology — a “doctor of philosophy” — reminds me of what the Aphorist says: A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque.

Nevertheless, this grotesquerie not only provided me with a vocation, but gave me sufficient slack to pursue my avocation, and here we are. Indeed, I am lucky enough that not only would I do this for free, I do it for less than that.

It’s almost too late to make a serious point, but Green’s book did provoke a surprising number of insights, one of which follows the truism that politics is downstream from culture. It is that culture is downstream from religion, but ESPECIALLY for the irreligious -- AKA the “nones,” the vulgar atheist crowd, the radical secularists, the new age retards, etc.

Suffice it to say, they are by no means irreligious, since that’s not a possibility for man. I suppose we’ll have to pick up this thread tomorrow, but I jotted down a list of religious categories that very much preoccupy the left, including:

--Dogma

--Purity

--Redemption

--The Elect

--The Accursed

--Omniscience and Omnipotence (for example, vis a vis climate)

--Eschatology 

--Heresy

--Excommunication

--Countless Devils

Etc.