The Sixties, Seventies, And Eighties
There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.
It is clear that the present new age includes those aspects of Sixties culture that deepened and spread, plus some significant changes in value and orientation. For instance, hallucinogens were popular during the Sixties, but seekers in the Eighties prefer mediums for their otherworldly trips. Drugs have been exposed as addictive and superficial (though not as universally and categorically as the current teetotalers would like to convince us). Activists in the Sixties and early Seventies specialized in anti-war rallies and street theater; those in the Eighties have on the one hand joined the political establishment and on the other launched clandestine Earth First! and Animal Liberation guerrillas. Meanwhile, computers and telecommunications have broken down barriers and spread information (even top secret) throughout the planet; the control of the State has eroded, and the so-called superpowers have been forced to collaborate to preserve a few more decades of their hegemony.
The psychedelic imagery of the Sixties has been diluted, but in its place is a more widespread and serious inroad into mainstream culture. While certain features of Aquarian culture have matured into viable institutions, others have spawned full-scale plagues. The recyclable energy systems and small farms that decorated the ideal Sixties landscape have been tested and integrated into the economy and even made the policy of a global party (Greens). The array of windmills at Altamont Pass resembles an Aquarian army displaced more (still) from the future than from the past. The hard-core communes have, for the most part, dispersed; their role is partially filled by sectarian camps and retreats. People do not as easily write the radical proclamation with their lives, preferring seminars to full-time living commitments, personal identity to group identity, guided growth to spontaneous breakthrough. But the communal “cults” of Rajneesh, Hare Krishna, and Reverend Moon are utter reversals of the freewheeling utopian farms of the Sixties. From Rainbow Gatherings and Deadheads to urban panhandlers and crack gangs, the decay of the Western logos is now severe and inevitable. These are not old-time rock groupies and social workers. They are truly the Vandals and the Huns.
The Sixties pretty much accepted institutional medicine while initiating alternative schools and farms. The Eighties have exposed the medical and scientific establishments and begun wholistic self-care programs. Buddhists have come to the West and set up strict trainings which many have willingly undergone, yielding some of their attachment to easy revelation and enlightenment. The Sixties’ sequinned goddesses and Indian robes have progressed into hologrammatic paradoxes and taos of physics. The original new age was mythological and pan-cultural; the later one has a theosophical and science-fiction ring.
Woodstock deteriorated into punk and then reestablished itself as “We Are The World,” Farm Aid, and Harmonic Convergence. While the Aquarians spoke of peace and centering, the present era seeks the actual grounding of Feldenkrais somatics, t’ai chi ch’uan, and aikido. Overaggressive peace-mongering has been exposed as part of the cycle of war; conversely, those who fought in Vietnam are viewed now more as the victims than the provocateurs. The inquiry into “peace and conflict” has been formalized, and comparatively more effort is going into comprehending the nature of the violence in us than into attacking the Pentagon. And the internal discipline and service of warriorship has been established as something different from the military. The Warrior Network, First Earth Battalion, and Guardian Angels have outflanked even the draft and the “pigs.” When Lomi School founder Richard Heckler trained the Green Berets in aikido and meditation, he found them more Zen, more “peace”-oriented than the local Marxist professors.
But there is also a new vanity and superficiality, a loss of sensuality and consciousness. Joggers with electronic gauges and miniaturized tape decks have supplanted poets, jugglers, and street artists. Manicured and tailored babies in fashion carriages have replaced longhaired funky kids in overalls and hand-me-downs. The Sixties partisans blatantly rebelled against the killer culture and stormed heaven’s gate; the Eighties have rebounded in shock and denial, and many of their partisans (in some cases the same people) now shun the spare and revolutionary lifestyle to punch in at the mirage of the economic revival and bottomless Asian market.
The effort to acquire and have “a good time” has been revived as something much more robotized and synthetic than it was during the cotillion and beach-party Fifties. Nothing will bring back Beaver and the Nelsons, and the pretense to Ward Cleaver merely leads to Ivan Boesky, the pretense to Audie Murphy gives us Ollie North. No more “back to the future.” Because we have used up everything . . . because we are tired of waiting . . . because we want to test the absolute bottom line before it vanishes into cosmic debt. Insider trading, cocaine dealing, airport terrorism, and ever higher-priced superstars are all different faces of the same desperate grasp at the ungauged infinity, while there is still matter left to grasp. Superman is now the Terminator, Donald Duck the self-conscious Roger Rabbit. When we try to elect Dwight Eisenhower, we get Ronald Reagan (the movie). Every attempt to be more poignant and real seems to make us less human, as though there were only mannequins and cartoon figures left in our repertoire. No wonder Stanley Kubrick ended “Full Metal Jacket” with the Marines marching out of Hue singing the “Mickey Mouse Club” song. At the same time we reach back nostalgically to the last glimmers of innocent joy that united us, we acknowledge that we are following an animated caricature of humanity across the jungles of Asia.
Science And Pseudoscience
The original new age drew its material and inspiration from such ancient and long-standing systems as alchemy, Buddhism, Taoism, astrology, and the works of technologically simple people. Because these practices had never been synthesized in the context of one another and a global society, their rediscovery and application in the Sixties made for a “new age.” In general, as the industrial culture of universal scientism disintegrates, original spiritual practices reappear in novel forms. Unable to integrate the activities of the “potential movement” without losing its own identity, institutional science attributes them to a combination of wishful thinking and poor education, at the same time dismissing them as superstitious and hiring hit men to blow them away. But new-age practitioners define themselves by this ghettoization: “We may not be scientists and skeptics,” they say, “but we are in touch with our humanity and with the greater rhythms of the cosmos that override epochal science.” There is arrogance and provinciality mixed with the wisdom in that stance.
In fact, many new-age beliefs are uneducated, unexamined pseudoscience: imitations and metaphors of scientific language are tossed off as if unassailable fact. For instance (and typically enough), the editor of José Argüelles’s “Harmonic Convergence” wrote me recently: “Like Argüelles, the cosmos and my own cells are luminous, filled with spiraling energy. I do not comprehend what it is to feel alone. You are a circular thinker, I am a spiraling thinker. It is almost as if we have completely different DNA.” (“Who goes around giving out the spiral-thinker academy awards?” I responded. “I think all our cells are luminous and filled with spiraling energy, not just yours and José’s.”) Because science is based on hermeticism and archetypal thinking (Pythagoras and Democritus, and ultimately, even Kepler and Newton), it is always subject to primary occult derivations. When these occult uses of science are not just stale slogans (or personal inflations, as above), they can be visionary and empowering. And that should not be a problem, except to doctrinal purists.
Meanwhile, a righteous and self-proclaimed objectivity has filtered from mass science into mass culture as a form of artificial life-making that infects the new age equally. The lives that people in the West have come to accept during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are often reflections of machines and bureaucracies, academic and political rigidities. People unconsciously perceive themselves as statistics, as products, as consumers, as molecular repositories of knowledge and professions, as enactors of styles and values. This general hypnosis is celebrated in beer and perfume ads, by couples on holiday, and in the melodramas people borrow — as if their own — from movies and magazines. One acquires enjoyment rather than enjoys: note the presumption of “quality time,” as if life flowed in even punch-clock packets. We have made ourselves equations of experimental hedonism, marathon runners chasing behind or after midlife crises.
Yet, existence is a thing that is spontaneous and beyond definition. When we ignore its hidden aspect our lives become automatic, and we seek fulfillment only externally and superficially. A careful reading of the Buddhist and Western esoteric traditions which helped spawn the Aquarian revival would deliver the same warning. The professions and public and civic goals of the twentieth century may yet be reflections of an inner transit, but one that has become utterly obscure.
New-Age Marketing
To my understanding, “new age” in the best sense involves an intention to experience and explore the interior of creation, beyond secular biological existence. The new age has also committed itself to feed the starving people in Africa and Asia; to preserve our soil and atmosphere (and elephants, tigers, and whales) for future generations; to rescue the rain forests; and to end the arms race — commitments which suggest that we are better than we have thus far shown, that we are still capable of walking off the edge of history. We know that it is impossible; yet we also know it must occur, that things cannot go on forever like this. We may support such an agenda for humanist, religious, or spiritual reasons, but it amounts to the same intention toward radical change. Those people who seek it may be at total odds with one another, but then their conflicts are also part of the intention toward change.
In light of all this, what is the new age at which this essay takes a critical look? Why is it that so much constructive and well-meaning activity requires criticism?
The answer is: the actual new age is not at stake here; the world must change according to esoteric principles at its core. But the marketed new age is at best a series of well-meaning simplifications and at worst a hustle and a fraud made possible by those simplifications. It is the marketing of the new age, the invention of attractive mirages, the promulgation of clichés, that this essay addresses. A true cultural and spiritual revival is our only hope.
One new-age hallmark is an unexamined belief in sacred geometry and geography. Crystals and pyramids are presumed to harbor and transmit power, though their mechanism is unknown. Pilgrims flock to old Indian ruins and South American temple sites as if these were the storage centers of palpable chi energy. The recent proclamation of a “harmonic convergence” in the solar system was a grandiose version of the same numerology and archetypalism.
I don’t see any reason to reject entirely the potential of crystals and pyramids or to debunk the flow of undiscovered energies through lei lines and between power points. In fact, these areas of inquiry hold much promise for the future. I suspect that big technologies in the universe are not run by fossil-fuel machines or nuclear power, or even by computers and superconductors, but arise from elemental mind/matter. Homeopathy’s success in treating patients with an “impossible” system of spiritualized pharmacy is an indication of the potential of vitalistic mechanics (though neither “vitalistic” nor “mechanics” may describe what is at stake). However, there is a difference between passively hanging crystals around one’s neck to receive healing, and internalizing the traditional lore of such stones in native cultures on a shamanic and experiential basis. There is also a difference between engaging with subtle rhythms and changes on a daily basis of study and meditation and gathering on a single day to proclaim a harmonic dividing line in history.
The uninvolved commitment to a new age becomes simply an escape to hypothetical enlightenment without having to participate in the mess and dissolution of the world. Activities like praying before the rising sun and gathering in groups to celebrate the mystery of the cosmos should be practices, not one-shot holidays. The words “love” and “peace” in and of themselves are phonetic lisps and mean nothing. They can represent heartfelt desires, but they can also, as Freud and Reich showed, reflect irritations, neuroses, and character armor that work against the very goals they denote. Harmonic convergences are counterproductive to the degree that they distract people from the real issues. They are like Fourth of July celebrations and rock concerts — on the calendar mainly to promote ideology and commerce.
As recent political escapees from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have noted, the West is debilitating in that it presents endless trivial choices — what toothpaste, what breakfast cereal, what shirt? People lose their lives in distinctions that have no meaning and no potential. “America” is just one version of a modern tyranny of ideology and bureaucracy — sometimes in the name of choice, sometimes in the name of the socialist revolution, but always in the name of conformity and the abstract power of economics. The danger is that sacred crystals have become like toothpastes, rock concerts like patriotic parades.
Millennialism
In our imaginary (cumulative) new-age holy book, life and the universe are a Gothic tale with plots and subplots (including angels, extraterrestrials, Atlanteans, intelligent sea mammals, Yetis, Indian guides, spirits taking turns taking over bodies and speaking oracularly, magical temples, messages left in pyramids, multidimensional travel, past-life evolution, the Second Coming, and the like). The new age is not yet a commitment to the unknown nature of reality or our own novel experience; it is a screenplay for events that have supposedly been programmed and foreshadowed, narrated to us by those who have already lived. This kind of on-high prophecy seems pretentious and elitist in the face of our actual condition.
The atmosphere and oceans continue to be contaminated and degraded; exotic — almost pornographic — weaponry multiplies on a global scale. This world is not even perceived as real by entrepreneurs and state terrorists; what can we then expect from transcendentals? (If the world is not ultimate reality, the new age implicitly argues, then how could the stage on which it is played be important? The tired seas and skies will crack like cheap porcelain and be replaced by many new dimensions of space-time. The Rosicrucians thought likewise in 1618, at the onset of a Thirty Years’ War.)
There are now drug skirmishes on the streets of North America. Tens of thousands of people wander homeless. And the terrorism of the rest is all too blatant. In the midst of our new-age renaissance lurks a greedy, know-nothing, caring-little-for-life culture that murders recreationally and racially and is wed to the basest of goods and displays. If you don’t like a referee’s call in neighborhood hoops, butcher him. If someone cuts in front of you on the highway — son of a bitch, gun him down.
Yet this is vintage new age: death followed always by rebirth, life by more life, degradation before evolution, Pisces unto Aries. How conveniently the dead Elvis and John Lennon are reconstituted and sighted on the mean streets! The new-age method of dealing with “big” problems too closely resembles the Armageddon cop-out, so tellingly cited by James Watt when he was queried about the consequences of using up our natural resources. The innocent victims of urban crime and terrorist explosives merely choose new bodies and return to the fray.
It is almost as though the very arguments used to affirm that the universe is benign and souls are eternal have become rationalizations for a brute and gaudy materialism, for trashing this terrain and wasting its bodies. The Ivan Boeskys, crack salesmen, and so-called yuppies still insist on their right to lifestyle at the expense of anyone and everyone; the fundamentalist scientists and Christians still fight each other to impose their separate versions of idolatry on the patriotic masses — though all these activities must end in emptiness against this century’s hollow background.
(The motivation behind new-age millennialism is suspiciously self-serving. Even if some of the apocalyptic scenarios intend to accelerate our evolution and rescue the whole planet, others have the same mean-spirited impetus as right-wing religious propaganda and chain letters: the faithful can barely wait for catastrophe because they expect to be its beneficiaries. So they send out letters from the Florida Keys claiming to be channels for Abraham Maslow, delightedly confirming the dates of Nostradamus’s earthquakes, in the guise of warnings. But what is passed off as unsullied prophecy merely masks unconscious curse.)
In addition, the various rescues by aliens, earthquakes, and economic collapses that have partial new-age allegiance (depending upon one’s affiliations) are denials of the complexity and commitment of life. It is not that they couldn’t happen; it is that they are not real. The biological process that underlies this world is profound and serious and represents a covenant with the divine force; it cannot be abrogated from other dimensions. If there is a macrocosm and a microcosm, these are not separated by great walls or even master geometries; they are joined a billion times more intimately than the minute branching and impregnation of nerves and flesh. If mere images and words are shattered between cosmoses, certainly our apologies redeem nothing. The Buddhist response of compassion and sorrow is still more appropriate than the new-age one of awaiting mutation and rescue.
Channels
There is also a “new-age” tendency to accept fairly standard conceits about cosmic and personal evolution from a variety of mediumistic channels. It is unclear whether the sources of these “spirit” messages are truly external and if external whether they are located on this planet, but additionally there is the problem of their content, which is either overly pat and clichéd or utterly obscure — leading one to question why any evolved being would go through the trouble to initiate such communications. Given the obvious difference between any embodied and disembodied worlds, real transmissions from spirits and the dead should be succinct and pithy. Yet you can find material identical to most of this channeling of multithousand-year-old beings in any second-rate metaphysics or theosophy book from the last five hundred years.
If you don’t believe that a yuppie Madison Avenue has taken over the image-making of heaven, consider that one of the wholesalers of Da Free John’s work recently suggested to the publisher (Dawn Horse Press) that the books would sell far better if the information were presented as channeled rather than spoken by a living master. We hardly need the debunkers, given the job the new age is doing on itself.
If someone is dead, is he or she necessarily wiser? Is not our present condition so extraordinary that the words of a living master are quite miraculous enough? The implication that the glimpse beyond death is so enlightening that it alone transcends any earthly enlightenment tends to trivialize both this life and the fact of dying, linking them in a trivial spy network. The whole thing smacks of Iron Curtains and ham radios.
Channeled messages are often trite and impractical (heavy on “peace” and “love” and “evolution,” which cannot be experienced except abstractly or enacted except as preached instructions), compared, for instance, to poetry which arises from muses that are not explicitly disembodied. By taking into account the opacity and intrinsic paradox of language, poetry is often much more mysterious and true to the riddle of our existence. The process of submitting one’s path to automatic writing or to a spirit is not necessarily trivial, but the continuous popularizing of such messages and the overall channeling phenomenon suggest a dangerously literal interpretation of the universe.
For instance, through mediums the spirits tell us that mankind is evolving but needs to break the cycle of violence and express the love implicit in all. They tell us our identity does not rest in mind or body but in spirit. They tell us that America is the forerunner of a new Jerusalem (or Lemuria). They tell us that we are God’s very design, and if we act from natural good instinct we will develop the better qualities of the universe. They tell us to summon healing from our hearts and send it through our arteries and neurons. They tell us reality is self-created — even bad reality. We can end our self-pity and create new reality any time (they do not mean to sound condescending, but this can be done even by blacks in South Africa and starving children in Cambodia and Bangladesh). They tell us to create new energy patterns, that ninety-nine percent of our being is already in communication with the other dimensions. They tell us there is a difference between female energy and woman. They tell us that male and female are primary poles in the cosmos and should engage creatively. They tell us there are beings on other worlds and in other dimensions, watching and aiding us, that they themselves are. They tell us that the landscapes of stars and planets are extensions of God’s love. They tell us that if we needed to feel guilty in this life we chose parents and a situation that would make us so. They tell us the Atlanteans could fly and change bodies, that they held the key to anti-gravity and transmutation. They promise they will meet us in the mountains of Peru. They say it is all radiant light, and we are light. They tell us that through many lifetimes, certainly. . . . They tell us dragonfly, sylph, subtle energy, angel, stone circle, aura, sacred shield, Osiris, cell hologram, with shining hair.
There is nothing malign or even unenlightened about these communications; they are in fact good gospel, but at the same time static, impersonal, and sanctimonious. They don’t grapple. They suggest that the path has been provided. If this wisdom could be followed literally and unambiguously, channeling would be a tool transcending any church or science. But insurmountable difficulties arise when one tries to take the content of these messages into lives. They cannot serve as a rallying point for any real change or growth. Compare these conceits to selected lines of contemporary poets:
“Who bury the dead/lead forth the bride/stainless in dress.” (Gerrit Lansing)
“Hail and beware the dead who will talk life until you are blue/in the face. And you will not understand what is wrong. . . .” (Charles Olson)
“There is no life that does not rise/melodic from the scales of the marvelous./To which our grief refers.” (Robert Duncan)
“I dip my hand in yours and eat your flesh/you are my mirror image and my sister/you disappear like smoke on misty hills.” (Diane di Prima)
“you’re a long way gone from here, Billy/body becoming earth and the rest of you farther than star light/messages across the green glaciers of interstellar drift.” (Lenore Kandel)
“To them we are weird while to us/They are not weird, to them we are undeniable.” (Edward Dorn)
“Nothing but/comes and goes/in a moment.” (Robert Creeley)
“There is something in me which is not open, it does not wish to live/it is dying/But then in the sun, looking out to sea/center upon center unfold/lotus petals, the/boundless waves of bliss.” (Joanne Kyger)
“whose name is love & which only of all light love can eat.” (Robert Kelly)
If the cosmos is presented as a finished thesis in a mediumistic context, then authority takes precedence over experience. And there is no place to go with such law, no way to generate new form and experience. Only when there is a feeling of unfathomable mystery and a sense of wonder do we change and affect the world. By language alone poetry represents active perception and life. Channeling represents frozen dogma and piety. Yet poetry books are virtually unsellable and channeled works have become our present godspeech and epitaph.
Crazy Wisdom
In truth, there is no simple plot to follow or set of instructions which will break down the paradoxes and contradictions of existence. The world is strange, and we are confronted, from the depths of the genetic code through the unconscious mind, with intuitions and transmissions of unknown relevance that inspire our growth and change. All human scripts begin in the middle of nowhere and end without resolution; this is as true for the formulas of physics as it is for the proclamations of Seth or Lazaris. The problem is not the channeled information itself but the illusion that its content explains our circumstance. The gods have chosen to be tricksters first, authorities never. Many Buddhist masters, Da Free John and Chögyam Trungpa included, have been assailed for their so-called crazy wisdom. Trungpa had disciples carry him around naked at a party; broke antennas off cars on a city street and handed them to a student; spent days speaking in spoonerisms. Assuming that the ego, the programmed mind, will subvert any material it is given — even the most shocking prophecies and pronouncements — these masters attempt to wake people through extreme behavior which challenges the basis of daily reality. While the new-age guru imposes a narrative on our lives and offers change through dramatic, cosmic events, the “crazy wisdom” teacher interrupts the mind-flow of self-image and social role; even a visit from the Martians would be less radical and disruptive.
This is a culture which already puts its faith in Biblical prescriptions that are removed from experience and do not require inner transformation or real understanding. Sacred verses are worshipped by their arbitrary numbers, the numerals paraded like totems at public events. They are insignias of combat and division, not mantras. The actual prescriptions of Christ demand radical change (giving up of wealth, following of a spiritual path), but people pay lip service to them, as to channeled messages, and seem not to care, therefore, whether preachers engage in hoarding of goods, corruption, and kinky sex with prostitutes. Jimmy Swaggart’s lapses, by reinforcing conventional notions of addiction and sexual neurosis, are actually the opposite of “crazy wisdom.” Note that Swaggart simplifies Jesus in much the way mediums simplify spirits. He acts out blatant perversions in direct contradiction to his own preachings and then announces he has been forgiven. Does not our whole species act with equal hypocrisy with regard to war, genocide, and the despoliation of our planet? It is no wonder that new-age clichés and Christian fundamentalism war for the allegiance of the same decade.
The Attack On The New Age
The reaction against simple reincarnative thinking should not lead automatically to nihilism or existential sparseness. Yes, there is a usefulness to Samuel Beckett’s vision of the deterioration of memory and loss of human capacity in that it is a creative realization of an aspect of nature that makes “new ageism” ludicrous and trivial by comparison; but to live and die in that minimal way does not really lead to internalization and growth (though to write about it does). In Molloy, Beckett writes:
“If there’s one question I dread, to which I’ve never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it’s the question, ‘What am I doing?’ ”
Part of our existence must be to invent our lives and deaths, and new-age thinking can be a step in that direction when it is individual and its vision is authentic. It is usually far preferable to those systems which attack it — progressive scientism and conservative religiosity. The former, in its least appealing and so-called humanistic guise (as professional skeptics and debunkers), is set up not so much to condemn blatant frauds as to discourage people from any form of inquiry other than approved scientism; it is purely and simply a religion, an orthodox religion with claims of salvation (albeit secular) but only if the Commandment is followed absolutely. Of course, science is self-defined as universal objective inquiry; thus, it assumes that any true study will come under its scrutiny and be subjected to its tests. In an ideal instance science is as experiential as Buddhism, but in actuality science is a closely guarded set of professional covens in which only already sanctioned truths are permitted. Professional skeptics are actually proud of their unwillingness to engage in paranormal experimentations. (Instead, they attend only to debunk.)
On the other side, the Christian fundamentalists attack the new age as pantheistic, a heresy equal, from their perspective, to scientism. The Christian attack (like the scientific one) is totalitarian — to prevent people from having experiences that might lead them to other systems of belief. Even various new-age groups are intolerant of each other and of “down time,” when the organism just drifts from day to day, unknowing. We comprise a civilization in which competing bureaucratic religions and political systems seek our total adherence and try to interest us in pledging our existences, our lives (and eternities) to their credos and roles.
Reincarnation And The Soul
People are truly bewildered; they go from accepting death as the end to believing that they have lived many times before. They take on the stories of other existences like movie scripts; therefore, this life must read to them like a movie script too. What is missing, in this guise of mythological immortality, is a sense of the bottomless sorrow of existence (including rebirth if need be), a sense of the pure carnal desire drawing one into life and through it, a sense of fear and agony before a nature which simply consumes. It is no fun to be on this roller coaster, but it is also bewitching, exhilarating, and charged with an intimation of the bigness of how the universe might be. In that sense, the sheer experience of the paradox of one life can be as powerful an insight into the reality of the universe as a recovery of innumerable other lives — so it almost doesn’t matter if this is the only life or one in a series. The fear of death — the fear of annihilation of the ego — may be our actual experience of immortality in that it is more intrinsic than any artificial and wishful projection of immortality; it is close to the heart of our existence.
There are also truths that arise from traditional meditation and other forms of inquiry that have to do with the fact of being in the universe. Because these come from the core of who and what we are, they have a truth that no science-fiction story can. If the other lives are not there and we face a hollowness, then great beauty and even immortality are born of that hollowness. Sorrow has real texture; dismay roots us at the heart. In bodywork, lethargy and lack of focus, a kind of dreariness, often lead to the soul quicker than exhilarating hits of pounding and release. We float in our own static and substance, between hunger and satiety, between grief and nothing. This is the true bottomlessness of existence, which is coeval to the bottomlessness of indivisible matter or the endlessness of the galaxies of stars.
Our culture has become so externalized and so dependent on events that we tend to invent outward manifestations of things which happen only internally and over great periods of time. We are in a hurry to complete evolution, to make contact with extraterrestrials, to live, die, get reborn, relive previous lives, and be done with it (although to what end and for what next we are uncertain). We evade the basic somatic fact of living and the commitment to the sullen and wild blue creation from which the real wonders of the cosmos come unplanned, unnamed, and often unnoticed. The sheer fact of life, the experience of love beyond sacristy, contains within it a coincidence and a vibration so powerful that cultural hype tends to be a distraction. The irony is that as we strive toward the cosmic we lose the cosmic, we replace the experience of profundity with the artificial projection of profundity onto shallow events.
Most writing about the “new age” is unremittingly hostile or appallingly upbeat. Rarely is it as thoughtful as this provocative essay from Richard Grossinger’s new book, Waiting For The Martian Express.
Grossinger’s primary loyalty, one critic has observed, “is neither to the counter-culture nor to the traditional culture, but to a scrupulous search for truth.’’ The author of Planet Medicine, Embryogenesis, and The Night Sky, Grossinger is also co-founder and publisher of North Atlantic Books (2800 Woolsey Street, Berkeley, CA 94705), from which Waiting For The Martian Express is available for $11.45 postpaid.
— Ed.
