This is a stream-of-thought blab, an attempt to fit an impossible philosophy into words. I’m sure I will rewrite it someday and delete this, but it’s here now. Why not?
On a rainy summer’s eve, 2021, in the far East Nashville, TN, Wodan Rudra & Chance Baker sit on a rotting wooden porch
C.B. - That’s a little too convenient. It’s always the same excuse when people can’t explain something logically. They say, “It can’t be explained logically.”
W.R. - Yeah, well, it’s not for a lack of words. It’s all words. Words aren’t big enough.
C.B. - Words aren’t big enough?
W.R. - You never listened to my last album?
C.B. - I didn’t know you released another album.
W.R. - Yeah, nobody else did either. Let me ask you something. Can you explain to me why a joke is funny? Can you explain the color green to a blind person? Can you explain music to a deaf person?
C.B. - No. But why would I even try?
W.R. - Exactly.
C.B. - It would be useless means of expressing it. It’s the wrong thing to attempt to explain.
W.R. - Yeah, exactly. Have you heard the Frank Zappa quote, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”?
C.B. - No, I like that though.
W.R. - Art, music, emotion, love, all the things that make life worth living are illogical. Existentially or spiritually, we who exist, we do not fit into words, do we?
C.B. - Existentialism CAN be explained in words, though. I just tend to appreciate western philosophy more than the mystical stuff. It just doesn’t appeal to me. The language… and the… you know…
W.R. - I understand. I really do. I spent 30 years doubting everything and arguing everyone. I romanticized my cynicism in music. Then I music’d my way out of cynicism, or at least redirected the bulk of its scorn to the prison itself, rather than the prisoners.
The so-called “mystical stuff” was garbage to me too, because I saw it as something which had to be followed or believed rather than something which could be experienced.
You understand that what I’m pointing at is an experiential shift in awareness, right? You understand I haven’t joined a fucking cult or religion or something?
C.B. - Yeah I know.
W.R. - Look, the last year has been impossible for me to be around people for the extreme nature of my experience. Now that I’m around people, I don’t have anything else to share other than my experience. I don’t care about minutia. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I care about the people who care about the minutia. I just have no more patience for minutia. The world got a lot bigger recently.
I don’t have a home or any way of making music anymore. I have nothing else to share but words. These self-deflating words are an attempt to inspire people. Otherwise, I guess I’m just another homeless asshole talking to himself about God. You never see homeless guys talking to themselves about finance or ecology. It’s always gods or demons, you know.
C.B. - You’re not acting crazy at all. I just don’t know how to relate with what you’re going through. I’m trying.
W.R. - What about Buddha? He’s a philosopher. Even when I was young, I loved Buddha. Is there room in your westernized philosophy for Buddha?
C.B. - I read that Four Agreements book. Is that mystical enough?
W.R. - Well, that’s a fine book, and it is interesting many Native American cultures parallel eastern philosophy. Four Noble Truths, that’s Gautama the Buddha, the O.G., the Mac Daddy of mysticism. He was the master of logically explaining the illogical.
Sadhguru is our generation’s master of logically explaining the illogical. I’ve been telling you about him for years now. He will probably make the most sense to you, and you don’t even have to read. Just Youtube. I can vouch for having personally experienced Sadhguru as that which is beyond logical… truly phenomenal being… unfathomable things…
C.B. - OK I will check him out. You’re saying you’re having an experience, but you’re not really saying anything about what the experience is. I feel like you’re kind of dodging it. Are you not able to talk without me reading or watching eastern mystics?
W.R. - So many of our peers answer to answers without ever asking questions. Trying to answer questions that people never asked for themselves, it never ends well. Explaining the unexplainable to someone who’s unwilling to seek it, it’s like cramming broccoli in a kid’s mouth. No matter how healthy or good it is, forcing it is asking to get your finger bitten off. No matter how good a thing is, if people don’t know that they want it, they will fight against it, especially when the thing is the self, the entire notion of self. People are so caught up in their identities, you know. Most people don’t want a spotlight on their ignorance. It’s gotten me in trouble my whole life. As long as you know I’m shining the same spotlight on my own ignorance, I can try.
As long as you’re open and willing to at least humor me, I can try. I mean, if I can’t inspire my friends, what’s the point of inspiration? What’s the point of words? Why write? Why speak? Why sing? If I cannot inspire…
As long as you know that I don’t really know anything, I do not attempt to preach or force feed but to inspire you to seek for yourself. That’s all I can do. “Seek and ye shall find.” See, there’s Jesus again. He’s always popping in.
Let me ask you this. Can we at least agree that existence is NOT logical?
C.B. - Well… Currently we might not be able to explain existence logically, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained logically.
W.R. - God… God bless our big, dumb westernized brains! I often dream of a Western Hemisphere where Plato outshined Aristotle and William Blake outshined Isaac Newton. Unfortunately we live in a deductive, logistical Newtonian Aristotelian shadow.
It’s not to say that logic isn’t important. Logic is important. I have profound reverence for all four men I just named, too. But two of these men embraced that which is logical AND that which is illogical simultaneously.
William Blake painted Isaac Newton at the bottom of the ocean, bent over with a compass examining our infinite world on a two dimensional page. I view it as a satire of Newtonian physics, the aftermath of Newton rather than the man himself, though I think Blake truly hated him.
Minds like Newton’s come around once every few centuries. Da Vinci, Einstein, you know, when these great minds come around, they change the way we think about literally everything. Humanity is forced to reframe the way we think. Literally.
Unfortunately, what always happens in the shadow of these great ideas is academia gets its dumb hands all over them. Scholars compete for who understands the ideas best, and none of them ever do. Academia mainlines these new academic bastardizations into new societal paradigms, and everything gets muddled into institutionalized orthodox garbage gibberish.
You know they’re still arguing about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? I have an old friend who teaches in Philly, a doctorate of philosophy. They’re still trying to fit the allegory into a logistical framework. Plato put the word “ALLEGORY” at the top of the fucking title, and they’re still trying to make it logistical. Those guys who work their ways up the totem poles in those institutions, it’s such a bureaucratic mess, like politicians, they go in for good reasons, but they get stuck in the smog. They become mindless cogs in the wheel of knowledge, competing to be most pedantic in their professional arguments with dead guys. They hand out superlatives for who disagrees with Kant in the most syllabled words.
We called them the “Useless P’s” during my brief stint at college. Political science, philosophy and psychology were what you majored in when you couldn’t find a useful major, when you realized you had no talents and would probably become a teacher. Those institutions charge so much money, the kids are in debt for decades, and it’s a mess. Where does the fucking money go? Where do the resources go? I changed my major to philosophy a month before I dropped out. That’s how I knew it was time to leave.
Do you know the worst thing about big, human brains? They think they know things. They don’t know shit. You know how Socrates knew the oracle was right about him being the wisest? Socrates was the wisest because every other wise-ass in Athens thought he was wise, and Socrates knew that he knew nothing.
Look, the only reason to write a poem or an allegory, an allusion is to point the reader towards that which cannot be expressed otherwise. The experience cannot be expressed logically, and words exist only within the bounds of logic. It’s like the religious nuts who think GOD exists inside the goddam bible, like it’s a popup book for jack-in-the-box-Jesus.
The scholars and the zealots are both competing for who can literally experience the words, and it looks to me like both sides are winning. How’s that for logic? Two competitors, and both are winning. Language is logical. Experience is not logical.
Have you ever heard the expression, “Don’t eat the map”?
C.B. - No. Sounds delicious, though.
W.R. - Words! They’re words. The map is made of words. It’s seeped in our western blood to spit our complicated, frilly language beneath our stiff upper lips whilst we pat ourselves on the backs for being so complex and complicated and smarty pants. We don’t know shit! We literally only know words, and they’re literally just sounds represented by shapes on a page. Literally.
This whole conversation is a big, dumb, boisterous attempt to whisper one silent truth in your ear. Like telling Plato’s shadow guys about the 3D world behind them. If you turn your head, it’s all there. It’s been there all along. It can’t be thought, therefore it can’t be spoken. It can only be pointed at or alluded to, but it’s such a subtle shift, all it takes is the will to do it. If you never moved, you might see a house in front of you as a square with a triangle on top of it. If all of a sudden, something came along and pushed you, you might fall to the ground, and it might scare the shit out of you, but you’d look up and see that the house was actually cubical not square, and the triangle was actually roofing with more dimensions on the side that you’d never known before, right? Then you go tell all your friends and they all say, “I don’t believe in houses. They’re just squares with triangles on top,” because your friends are still sitting in the exact same place.
The teachings of Sadhguru are deceptively simple, but he’s using logic to reel us in and point us toward that which is beyond logic. You start seeing words as simply signposts.
Or read the Gnostic Gospels. Nobody’s trying to be smart or logical. If the words seem contradictory or oxymoronic or poetic, it’s a pneumonic device to point the reader inward. They really are pointing at something. The experience can only be experienced. The words cannot be experienced.
Spiritual or mystical texts are often childishly simple because spirituality is essentially childlike and obvious. It’s just that our big, dumb, western minds want things to be complicated. We’re the only species on earth that thinks for entertainment and the only species whose minds kill our bodies for no reason whatsoever. Suicide isn’t logical, is it? It’s the same thing, identifying with our big dumb brains, crossword puzzles and suicide are just two ways of dealing with the imaginary problems our brains invented.
It’s actually Eckhart Tolle who calls words “signposts.” There’s something real, something visceral the words are pointing at, but it’s something which can only be experienced. It cannot be said. It cannot be spoken.
You never finished that Tolle book I sent you?
C.B. - Well, I have a hard time with the language of it. Maybe if I can get past the language of it…
W.R. - I don’t particularly like the language of it either. Rather, I wouldn’t have written it that way. But that’s why I bought it for you. If I had written it my way, it would probably end up being ridiculously complex. If I had my way, we’d probably all speak in triple entendres. Poetry would be the only language! But then nothing rational would ever be accomplished. Mowing the lawn would be an epic, divine comedy. Virgil would guide me through seven layers of sod. Who am I kidding? If I had my way grass would grow exactly as it desired to grow, and nobody would dare cut it down.
Nobody understands my poetry or lyrics for all the esotericism. Oh, they will… someday they will. But I bought all my friends and family The Power of Now because I wanted to share some aspect of my spiritual experience with you all, but I’m incapable of sharing in such an obvious way. In Tolle’s childlike language, we’re pointed inward toward that which is beyond language. It’s the same place where poetry and music come from. The Power of Now may be the single most accessible book for the big, dumb modern mind to find that which controls it -inward expansion or that which we call spirituality. It’s accessible to children the way he says it, yet it’s exactly what all the ancients tried to say in so many words.
The thing is, everyone’s pointing towards the same absurd reality which lives and breathes through us. Aldous Huxley called it “Perennial Philosophy,” but it’s just an understanding that we’re all speaking about the same thing, the same existence, the same source of life, the same source of the universe.
It’s absolutely absurd that we’re here at all, right?
Absurdity! Absurdity! Absurdity!
C.B. - I love the absurdists. The Stranger is still one of my favorite books.
W.R. - It’s one of my favorites too. Truly, I love the absurdist philosophers more than any of the other western persuasions. Absurdity is still very important to me, as absurd as it seems.
C.B. - Camus, for sure.
W.R. - And de Beauvoir. I’m often reminded of the danger of those who hold partial truths. She’s referring to nihilists, but it applies to all whom attain some level of truth within themselves and become emboldened by it. They become much more dangerous than the ignorant.
C.B. - Interesting…
W.R. - Half truths tell the whole-hearted lie. I found myself going in circles, with all the partial truths. How many more theories do we need? Like, I want experience. I want to expand. I want freedom. I want the whole truth. I do not want any more concepts! Same way thoughts and words can only point us towards what art is, thoughts and words can only point us toward what being is.
Let me ask you this. Which came first, being or thinking?
C.B. - Well… being.
W.R. - Right. Being is a prerequisite for all things. Thinking only exists because of being. Thinking doesn’t know the definition of being. Thinking can only imagine what being is because being is much bigger than thinking. Thinking is a tool invented by being. Evolutionarily speaking, thinking could simply be called a heightened reflex.
C.B. - I think therefore I am.
W.R. - Which probably should read, “I am therefore I think,” but regardless, if the deduction concludes with “I Am,” that’s the only thing western or eastern philosophy can truly conclude linguistically. This is something about which I strongly disagree with Sadhguru, Eckhart Tolle and many others. I’ve heard so many spiritual teachers defer to Descartes as proof that western thought is based on a lie, but to me it’s obvious that Descartes was saying the exact same thing as the spiritual teachers: “No matter what else is true, I Am. I know nothing except that I exist.”
The part everyone leaves out is “I doubt.” Descartes is saying “I doubt the illusion, therefore there must be something in me which doubts, therefore I conclude that I Am.”
“I Am” is repeated across the world as a sort of name for the supreme Godhead. Soham is a Hindu mantra, “I Am That I Am That I Am That” then what God told Moses, “Tell them I Am hath sent you,” then Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I Am.” Every tradition has some version of God being called “I Am.” The consciousness in everyone and everything, I Am That.
To my understanding, that was exactly Descartes’ point. “I Am” is all I know for certain. I don’t truly know anything else because my five senses fail me so often with mirages and dreams and delusions. Who knows what else exists?! I don’t know. All I know for certain is that I exist.
To my perception, these two things are the same: I Am That I Am and cogito ergo sum.
Did you know he used to torture and kill dogs?
C.B. - Huh?
W.R. - Apparently Descartes tortured animals to prove a point about consciousness. He nailed dogs to a post or something. I used to defend Descartes. I don’t know what I’m doing defending him now. I suppose I want a bridge between science and religion and philosophy. I want humanity to see that we’re all in this together. But then there’s shit like that. Then I find out the pioneer of western thought nailed his dog up like Jesus.
C.B. - Still shouldn’t change your opinion of western philosophy. Isn’t that the case with everything? MLK’s a womanizer. Wagner’s an antisemite. We still love their contributions, right?
W.R. - In more ways than one, western philosophy nails itself to its own cross. It’s a self-defeating process, in my experience. Eastern philosophy, broadly, is the process of deduction, where all I am left with is the authentic self. And western philosophy tortures and kills dogs.
C.B. - Ha!
W.R. - Do you know, all the way back to my teenage years, I had a big poster of Socrates on my wall with the quote “Know Thyself.” I think my mom bought me that poster for Christmas or something.
I mean, where would I be without western philosophy? I haven’t all-of-a-sudden become “anti-western philosophy.” In fact, in my spiritual pursuits, I am often reminded of my favorite Greeks. In a sense, I’m paralleling Allegory of the Cave in this conversation where I’m trying to point you towards something I cannot say in words.
Plato’s panpsychism, his theory of forms, and so many more of his theories point us towards the same great metaphysical truth as the yogis and the mystics of the east.
I insist, to the dismay of the professorial lab rats of western dogma, the colleges and universities of Universal Idiocy, and to my universal delight, that Plato was absolutely a hundred percent spiritual, and goddammit so was Socrates!
Socrates is said to’ve looked to a “guide” which we would now refer to as a guardian angel or spirit -an energetic divinity of some sort.
C.B. - I didn’t know that.
W.R. - The reason Socrates didn’t write anything down is because he knew people would distort the meanings of his words! His entire teaching was based around everyone finding out everything for ourselves. Do not believe anything you haven’t experienced! There’s another Jesus parallel, especially if you know the gnostic gospels. Jesus didn’t write anything down either, and look how mangled his words got! They both got killed for speaking truth to power, and both of their intentions are nearly lost to history.
Socrates says, through self-inquiry alone we find truth. Sadhguru says, there is no experience outside of self. When we fall in love, we fall in love within ourselves. When we see the beauty of a sunset, we experience the sunset within ourselves.
This is an overlying truth in eastern mysticism. But it was also spoken by the Father of Western Thought. Socrates Argument of Opposites reads exactly like the Tao. He clearly understood the dualities or the yin and yang. He just used different language for all of it. Or Plato did, since he didn’t write. Socrates called his spirit guide “daimonion,” which I imagine to be similar to the kundalini guide. But who knows? It’s experiential. It cannot be spoken or shared.
Quite contrary to the moronic modern summations of spirituality, I find skepticism to be a great tool on the spiritual path. If I believed everything that’s happened to me the past year, I would be insane. Kundalini is terribly confusing. Skepticism has kept me in check. Spirituality is not about believing. Herein lies the differentiation between religion and spirituality.
We westerners refuse to open up to the idea of spirituality because the religious zealots have so horridly mangled the words of the ancient spiritual teachers, by the time we’re adults we’re permanently opposed to everything which cannot be discerned through the five senses.
Isn’t it funny, though, that we become avid orthodox science-mongers, instead? We’re not using scientific method. We’re self-defining by things we read, things that so-called scientists wrote down. That’s not science. Repeating what a scientist said isn’t science at all, is it?
C.B. - Well, yeah. I mean there is a lot of confusion, but I still believe in science.
W.R. - Science is a tool. A tool cannot be true or untrue, believed or disbelieved. A tool can only be used or abused. By the time words become words, they’re already lies. The only truth I can truly speak to you is that I Am. Everything else is just an assumption.
Some dumbass at the esteemed university got a grant to study a thing that happens to parallel the capitalistic longings of an ever-greedy society. By the time you read about it, what you’re calling science is what? An article? Then you proclaim to know it and you know it’s true. Why? “Cuz Science.” The progressive rallying call, “Science!”
C.B. - I guess it’s like saying I believe in a hammer.
W.R. - Ha! Right. True science is humbling, not screaming, not believing, but being awestricken by an immeasurable ignorance! Ignorance knows no bounds!
I know some humble scientists. Individually, I think all humans are awestricken by it all. We use scientific method in inquiry to try to enhance our individual experiences and our collective experience of life. Science is perfect when it’s used properly. But to say I believe in it or I know it? I don’t know anything. I don’t believe anything.
You know the scientific community can’t even agree on what life is, nevertheless where it came from or what’s the nature of consciousness. They call it “The Hard Question,” which sounds more like an episode of Sesame Street.
The most colloquial name of all existential theories sums up scientists’ understanding of existence perfectly:
“It’s called Big Bang.”
Huh?
“Yeah, there’s no God. Just a… uhh… big… bang…”
Well that’s interesting and all, but it doesn’t really answer any of my existential questions.
“14 billion years ago… or maybe more… we can’t see past that, actually… but something like 14 billion years ago… there was a… bang… and it was big…”
OK, still though, I don’t feel any closer to understanding existence, consciousness, life, or anything really. “Big Bang” answers zero of my questions. Thank you all for that, though. Keep up the good work.
C.B. - If I didn’t know you, I’d probably try to defend astrophysics somehow, but I know you’re being stupid on purpose.
W.R. - Radical absurdist hyperbole is the only linguistic gesture big enough to scream the profundity of That which I’m attempting to gesture towards. You know there’s infinity between the numbers zero and one. More you dissect the number one, the longer the decimal, the more complex the equation gets, and it never ends. Half of half of half of something is no closer to zero or infinity. The number becomes infinitely more unknowable. The more you dissect a thing, the more complicated it gets. The only way to know infinity is through self.
I’m pointing out the infinite ignorance between the so-called “facts” of science. How does that “fact” replace our existential ignorance? I absolutely love physics, and I’ve obsessed over space my whole life. I grew up eating dinner with astronauts, back when my Mom worked at Space and Rocket Center. I love all of it, but it’s one hundred percent existential ignorance. The dawn of time, the dawn of life, the great I Am is absent from this equation, because infinity cannot fit into an equation. Science is a beautiful tool, a perfect tool, but science cannot explain consciousness, because science is a tool invented by consciousness. The hammer cannot know the hammerer.
You know what I view to be the worst bastardization of science ever? The most destructive misuse of science? Do you remember the thing about the cognitive behavioral “scientist” vs. the neuroscientist?
C.B. - Oh yeah, I told that to my psychiatrist and she actually kind of agreed. I told her my friend in LA says,
“You go to a psychiatrist and ask about the human brain, and she’ll answer every question assuredly with utmost confidence. You’ll walk out with all your questions answered and a new prescription in hand.”
“Then you go to a neuroscientist and ask about the human brain, and he’ll respond humbly, ‘we’re making progress, but we know very little about the human brain.”
W.R. - Very, very little, indeed! Yes, that’s a perfect exemplification of “science” vs. SCIENCE. Cognitive behavioral “science” isn’t science. It’s people categorizing symptoms and lumping diverse populations into ‘norms’ and comparing and contrasting individuals to the ‘norms.’ The entire system is set up so that anyone who wants to be diagnosed with something can and will be diagnosed with something. Essentially, this “science” presumes mother nature herself is a preexisting condition.
We’re born into this society which pressures us and incentivizes this unnatural anti-natural domineering lifestyle, and we’re punished when we can’t keep up. The demands this society places on individuals is entirely unrealistic, entirely unhealthy, but instead of changing our societal paradigms, we medicate and treat our individual symptoms. These are not innate symptoms. Mother Nature didn’t do this to us. We’re doing it.
Going out on a limb here, imagine you fell out of a tree and broke your leg, took some medication to numb your leg, and then jogged for 20 miles til your leg literally fell off. The pain in your leg was telling you something very, very important, and medicating the leg to the point of not feeling the leg, that is willful ignorance. Sadness, for instance, is a very, very powerful emotion with a very, very powerful purpose. Attempting to turn it off like a light switch, that has the potential to break you. Treating our emotions the same way we fix broken car parts is having devistating effects.
Psychological classifications are taxonomic shots in the dark. For the sake of analogy, genealogy’s showing a lot of biology’s wild guesses in taxonomic classifications were also wrong. The diagnosis of bipolar, for instance, it’s such a vague diagnosis. It’s obvious when you line up 3 people diagnosed with bipolar 1 their symptoms vary wildly. It’s like a chihuahua, a poodle and a wolf. Are these really the same? Bipolar just means, we don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with these people. They exhibit extreme dualities, so we put them into a category. The earth’s bipolar, you know. Earth also exhibits extreme dualities. Yin and yang, masculine and feminine, light and dark, everything has an opposite, and some people exemplify dualities, some embrace them, and some bypass all the nonsense. There’s entire philosophies and spiritual lifestyles dedicated to embracing and practicing “non-dualism”.
We must take responsibility for ourselves. Victimhood, no matter how dire the circumstances, is not the answer. Bipolar folks need to realign themselves to the natural ebb and flow of the universe, not to block chemicals in the brain. You can put new shutters on the house, but eventually, one way or other, you’re going to have to address the foundation. If the house is broken, it needs to be dissembled and reassembled, which requires acknowledging all the parts, opening up all the doors, even the weird shit in the basement and attic. It’s not pretty, but changing the shutters or medicating yourself ain’t gonna fix the foundation. Meds can be a great bridge or postponement or preparatory step in the ladder. It’s just, Big Pharma has swaths of our population believing they need meds for life.
The secrets of sleep will uncover amazing truths. Circadian rhythm will reveal the rhythm of life. The human gut will reveal another mind banging out the eighth notes in the same rhythm, the same clockwork.
People studying bipolar patients ought note the relationship of circadian rhythms and mood swings to the moon cycle. More modern science digs, the more macrocycles will be discovered as they relate to the human system. You’ll find bipolar folks synching to macrocycles like an orchestra following sheet music. Different sections of the orchestra will show different aspects, but humanity and nature, we’re all playing this piece together. 11 year solar cycle, annual cycle, lunar cycle, all the cycles will make bipolar folks excellent test studies for the population writ large, for humanity are all imbalanced.
Depression was called ‘sin of sloth’ in the Bible, which always had some elixir. Aristotle noted all the poets and artists had a similar “melancholy,” but Athenians wouldn’t have seen it as a disability -certainly not an illness. We think modern psychiatry has our brains figured out. I think every generation before us thought they had it all figured out too. The entire study of psychiatry has become the institutionalization of the snake oil salesman of the past. As psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “a century of psychology and we’re all getting worse!” That was a century ago, before Big Pharma.
Snake oil comes in many forms. Big Pharma is, for my money, the worst of the worst of the worst of all previous incarnations of snake oil. Compile the destruction of all past endeavors to control human thought, human spirit, and Big Pharma is exponentially worse for humanity. Insult to injury compiled by our obsessive modern habits of shoving toxins into every orifice, tortured animals in the mouth, tortured air in the nose, bright flashing lights in the eyes, never knowing the sound of silence.
This is the age of dichotomous psychological plague and psychological arrogance. Over diagnosis has lulled my generation en masse with the highly destructive power of suggestion. Just tell someone not to think of a pink elephant every day. That’s the cognitive behavioral approach. Physical, mental, emotional, energetic imbalances being reduced to “I have depression. It’s clinical.” It’s not something a patient should affirm every day. We are psychosomatic beings, and we will find easy scapegoats without our society’s suggestions. This society is oppressing, victimizing, and scapegoating individual symptoms in what is a colossal societal failure, and individuals are latching on to these broken identities which isn’t helping the society or the individual. It’s making some shady overseas medical company into billionaires, but it ain’t doing us any good. Our symptoms have become our identities. So much of our population is oppressed that we think acknowledging each other as victims is empowering. It’s not! We must take responsibility for ourselves! I’m seeing a lot of outspoken pridefulness about psychiatry losing its social stigmas, and it looks to me like a big red flag. Normalizing psychiatry without addressing the actual issues is a trap. When individuals look to the establishment, and the establishment tells the individuals they are flawed, shouldn’t we also question the establishment?
Psychiatry is not addressing the roots. It trims the bushes and pretends it made the forest. But anyone who’s paying attention knows those roots are fucking rotten.
Is anyone addressing the human being as a whole? Are you eating tortured animals and corn syrup 3 times per day? Are you drinking yourself to sleep each night? Do you masterbate multiple times per day? Do you find yourself sighing and sighing and sighing all day? Are you fearful of everything all the time? Are you sitting or lying down 23 hours of the day, every day? Do you brag about your hectic, stressful schedule as though it’s an accomplishment to incessantly remain in compulsive thought and action? Is anyone asking these questions BEFORE they hand over the prescription?! The whole field of modern psychiatry is ass backwards. Do NOT go in there.
Everyone in this society is getting exponentially more “ill” as time goes on. So the “norm” we’re comparing patients to are exponentially more anxious, stressed, overweight, more diabetic, more insomniacs. We’re shoving pills in our mouths in order to meet the imbalance of this unnatural anti-natural society’s sick, stress-inducing demands. We the People are living our individual hells which prop up the collective hell from which so few of us are actually benefitting. Instead of addressing the runaway train we’re all on, we’re all pumped up on benzos, adderal, SSRI’s, sleep meds staring at our screens scapegoating our illnesses unto the world wide web, “I have depression. It’s clinical.” so we don’t have to look out the train car window to see the sun setting into a manmade conflagration hellscape. This is our society. We all believe that we are innately flawed and our society knows what’s best for us. We all believe in these false paradigms and blame ourselves for our aching souls. It’s a fucking cage we’re in, and we’re chaining ourselves to the cage pretending the chains are seatbelts.
The reason I keep blabbing on and on about psychiatry is it may be the single most destructive hinderance blocking the spiritual path. For years, my mind, body, emotion and energy were screaming at me, and I refused to listen. I was listening to science alone. It wasn’t until I took matters into my own hands the spiritual path opened up to me.
There’s this “belief” that the scientific community has figured it all out, that it’s all been explored, and humans know the truth about all things now. It’s the naivety of EVERY generation. Every generation believes they’ve figured it all out, and every generation believes their newest ideology is the right ideology. The newest thing always seems like the truest thing, but it never is. The institutions turn it all into FACTS. Facts which are all lies.
C.B. - I still think we’re doing a lot better than past generations. I mean our health, longevity of life, modern conveniences… We’re living much better lives all-around.
W.R. - Comparing and contrasting life with previous generations is fun to conceptualize. It’s my entire love of history in a nutshell, romanticizing and humanizing the past, pretending I’m riding alongside Alexander the Great for the eastward expansion of the greatest empire the world’s ever known. Or I’m a private in the great American Revolution, being paid in rum and scurvy, as George Washington rides by on his white horse riling up the troops from our makeshift rubble camps where each of us has only 4 bullets, yet in the name of liberty we’re about to attack the world’s greatest superpower! Don’t tread on me! Yeah, I love that shit. It’s fun to imagine. It’s impossible to know what any given human’s quality of life was then or is now.
I find that when people compare our modern lifestyles to those of the past, they’re often referring to either the dark age or they’re comparing us to early hominids. Yeah, humans have had a hell of a ride, and it’s gotten really dark at times, but there was a lot of time between the age of homo Erectus and the medieval age. There were periods of great prosperity for humans across the globe. Everything waxes and wanes. It’s entirely unnecessary to compare and contrast our lives, but it can bring us great cultural insight to put ourselves in historical context.
I don’t think I’m alone in my assessment of the modern life. It’s ridiculously difficult and completely uselessly so. It’s difficult to know end, and there seems to be no goal in sight. I see humanity in a human-made prison we don’t know how to get out of. The whole thing seems to revolve around money, and if money makes life joyful, I’m for it! It doesn’t seem to work, though. Rich people seem to be even more pissed off than poor people. Everyone who owns anything seems worried they’re going to lose it all, and those who have nothing are all striving hopelessly to own something. Everyone lives up to their exact means. Two houses, three cars, and a boat will surely make you joyful, right? What gives? When’s enough enough? Meanwhile there’s folks who’d give an eye just to have one home! Capitalism is the manufacturing of an artificial infinity, an exponential growth which never suffices, an inhalation which never exhales, an impossible economic equation which can only end in collapse. Pendulum can only swing one direction for so long.
The distinction should be made between quality of life and longevity of life. Dementia is wreaking havoc on our elderly. Seems to me there’s a correlation with dementia or Alzheimer’s and our culture’s obsession with longevity of life, fixing the body up, replacing parts like it’s a used car, without understanding the mechanism which fuels it. When the car runs out of fuel, and you don’t know anything about the source of the fuel or where to get more, there’s no use fixing the car.
And as far as disease is concerned, I recognize the wonder of modern medicine. I’m not ignoring the great medical advancements of the past century. I just want to point out that modern life is propagating a lot of these diseases. HIV didn’t exist in humans a few decades back. There’s sufficient evidence to show that the polio vaccine might’ve actually spread HIV from monkeys to man. A century ago cancer and diabetes were much less prevalent, so God only knows how these diseases affected humanity over the millennia. Polio was spread by modern society eating its own feces. It spreads from shit getting in the water. Every ancient civilization knew not to shit where you eat. So commonplace, it’s an idiom isn’t it?
Most of these diseases have more to do with overpopulation, overcrowded cities, unnatural diets and unnatural lifestyles, than they do with Mother Nature’s “scorn”. And our susceptibility to these diseases evolves with us, meaning ancient tribesmen or cavemen, they didn’t have all these predispositions to all these diseases. We’re more susceptible now to all these diseases because of the way our parents lived and their parents lived and their parents and on and on. What I’m saying is, modern medicine is great at curing modern diseases, but in many cases we manufacture these diseases in our bodies by how we treat our bodies. I find the same catch 22 with most of our modern conveniences. They attempt to alleviate the same ailments and misalignments they cause. Our bodies are products of every generation before us who attempted to dominate and control Mother Earth. And now we pat ourselves on the back for curing the symptoms we caused. It’s a common theme here, you know, that Mother Nature didn’t fuck up when she made humanity.
There’s a tiny subset of our population which uses technology for the advancement of human potential, with reverence for the planet and reverence for every species on the planet. The other ninety-some-odd percent are using technology to avoid life. People burrow away into their little cubical holes and bury themselves in mindless entertainment. We call that normal. We’ve become a people who cannot sit with ourselves for fear of our own thoughts. Technology is the ultimate distraction. By one calculation, pornography makes up 70% of everything on the internet. The greatest medium humanity has ever known, and this is what we’re doing with it. Social media which incentivizes cruelty, incentivizes hyperbole, incentivizes lies, is a horrific step in human evolution, one which will take generations to overcome. Video games are being lauded as beneficial to kids who want to succeed in the modern age. Succeed how? Don’t we know innately that sitting in front of a screen for hours each day is terrible for us? Do we really need science to tell us that?! Humanity has produced a generation of kids addicted to stimulus, senses overblown by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings. The majority of technology is being used to avoid life, and the effects of avoiding life are all around us.
Our culture’s obsession with fame and popularity only means the blind are leading the blind. Don’t you know American celebrities are infamously insane? We look to actors for guidance? In Shakespeare’s time, actors were buried outside town with the prostitutes. In my time, they’re worshipped for their amazing opinions. And the popularity contest with social media is just another addiction. These kids are addicted to “likes.” I suppose everyone wants to be worshipped. Vanity is the worst characteristic of humanity. It’s narcism run rampant. Humanity has produced a society which glorifies and celebrates the worst characteristics of humanity. Somehow, even you, my intelligent friend, have concluded that we’re better off than all past generations.
To be blunt, I don’t see very many joyful people. I see people across the country who are obsessed with their minutia, stressed and anxious and avoiding everything that makes life beautiful. I’m not projecting. I know some people who’ve found their niche, too. I don’t mean to say it’s entirely impossible to live a joyful life in the 21st century. But I don’t see “modern conveniences” as the source of that joy. Joyful people in the 21st century are finding joy through the same means as joyful people in every other century, through a connection with earth, food that comes directly from the earth, daily interaction with earth, daily sunlight, daily exercise, life-affirming social interaction, and at least some kind of basic spiritual practice, even atheists.
My only problem in life is finding exactly that, a place to be in nature without this society interfering. This society tells me I have to play by its rules, owe it years of my life, work its miserable jobs cleaning up its miserable messes while propagating the new messes in order to receive little green pieces of paper that I slave over in miserable conditions for years so that someday this miserable society will trade me those little green pieces of paper for a piece of land where I can sit in the woods alone.
That doesn’t work for me. I’m just going to sit in the woods. There’s plenty of land for everyone. There’s plenty of resources for everyone. I just want to experience Mother Earth the way she is.
C.B. - You think you should just be given land?
W.R. - There’s nowhere left in this country to sit down without being indebted to someone or something. In the last year, I’ve been kicked off private land, state land, federal land, national forests, state parks, local parks, deserts, mountains, beaches, wilderness, rivers, lakes… Someone inevitably shows up with a shotgun or a badge, or else there’s a barbed wire fence.
It’s a very western thing to build a fence around something and call it “mine.” Barbed wire was the end of the cowboys, you know. End of the wild west will be the death of me.
And yes, I’m tired of being a fucking charity case! Have I not contributed enough to your goddam society to be allowed a small place in the woods where I can be left alone with Mother Earth? Do I really have to keep bouncing around? How is it that my music is in all those dumb tv shows and films and getting millions of streams each year and I’m still living out of a car? Yes, I think something’s askew when pictures of butts pay for land and 2 decades of music doesn’t. See, no matter how I say that it sounds like “pity me.” I don’t want pity. I want a fucking home!
What I don’t understand is, didn’t I already pay for this fucking National Forest? Didn’t my parents pay for it? Their parents and their parents? How are you kicking me off a mountain? Who owns this fucking mountain? It’s my goddam mountain as much as it is anybody else’s! You stole this mountain from the Chumash anyways! This is nobody’s mountain or it’s everybody’s mountain. Either way, I’m not fucking leaving.
Building boundaries between things is what westerners do. That’s what took the Native Tribes off-guard. They didn’t understand our entire ideology was based around OWNING and DOMINATING nature. It’s not like that in the natural world. I mean, it’s not true in our world either. We don’t own shit. We just pretend like we own earth and we pretend we dominate her. We pretend we understand her.
In science, we found consistencies and called them “laws.” Anything that appeared to be constant, we called it a law, then after all the laws changed, we started calling them theories. See? Science finds humility. What was Jefferson’s quote about every generation has to fight their own war of independence? Every moment has to fight its own war of existence. Every scientific fact must be reaffirmed by the one who experiences it, otherwise what is it? It’s just words, symbols, 2D graphs. Will to power is an incessant state of flux! Don’t eat the map.
Science should come with a Bill of Rights and clause for infinite amendments. For every constant, there’s infinite alternatives. The universe is in constant movement. The only constant is change. There’s no fucking laws. It’s the Wild West out there. There’s no barbed wire either.
As above, so below. We’re literally inventing the universe with the universe as the universe propagates itself, ourselves. The Indian mathematicians -Indian from India- who built the foundation of modern science, they all knew infinity couldn’t fit into a human brain, human “laws,” human boundaries. Because they knew nature couldn’t be owned, dominated, or understood intellectually.
Mark my words, the speed of light isn’t even constant. It appears relatively constant relative to our dumb point of view of a few relative years of moving spacetime we call home. Home relative to nothing, relatively. Nothing’s constant. Everything’s relative to everything, which is all one thing relative to nothing. And cabbages and kings, and curiouser and curiouser.
So much is based on that one idea, that the speed of light is constant. It isn’t, I assure you. It only appears so, for now, from here. The institutions will have to rewrite all the books and they’ll have to admit they’re wrong about everything, so they’ll deny it as long as they can.
Remember when the Catholic Church apologized to Galileo?
C.B. - No. What?
W.R. - When I was a kid, the Catholic Church issued a statement apologizing to Galileo. Pope John Paul George Ringo or whatever his name was, he issued a public address to poor ol’ Galileo. It only took the Church 400 years to say, “Oops, sorry Galileo, I guess you were right. Sorry we imprisoned you and blasphemed science.” then they went on persecuting gay people while raping little boys, so clearly they got their priorities in order.
C.B. - Ha!
W.R. - I'm aware that all this shit-talking doesn't sound very "spiritual." I'm just redirecting the rebel, see? I'm repurposing the fight. I'm not oblivious to the rebellious spirit within me which loves the fight, the upstream swim, Camus' Sisyphus testing the waters at each level. It’s funny when the rebellion starts coming full circle. I turned my back on the idea of God when everyone was trying to cram it down my throat, then surrounded by atheist agnostics, I’m the goddam prodigal son. I rebelled against everything, and now the ultimate rebellion is actually, you know, acceptance, or just, like vigilant joy -remaining in vigilant awareness.
Vigilant joy seems much less destructive than all the other rebellious acts, right? But it's not. We have to empower the destructive tendencies to fight off the dark shit we spent all those years manufacturing. The shit we inherited from our parents' parents' parents', we have to fucking demolish that shit. We have to go to war with hell, that state of being we don't want around anymore. The lizard brain, the dog brain, we must fight like hell, the so-called demons that plague us, the tendencies which bog us down, we must use all the devil's dirty tricks against him. Poke him in the eye. Kick him in the nuts.
And doesn’t it make sense that a rebellious spirit would fight its way up to the highest authority? Like, we ain't messin' with local police when we know the attorney general. The first authority is usually parents and teachers. You realize they’re fallible pretty early on. I remember finding out the Versailles was this beautiful palace in France, but my elementary school was on the corner of a street called Versailles Drive, and all the teachers pronounced it "Vur-Sales." 4th grade they taught us General Lee was a war hero. That’s around the time I stopped believing in education. When I was probably 14 or so, I got mad and destroyed my guitar like Kurt Cobain, who was my hero at the time. I left on foot, and was tracked down by police. I found out my Mom had called the cops on me. I never obeyed my parents again. I mean, they relinquished their authority by sending a higher authority after me. Sitting in the back of a cop car, these small town cops, they're just kids who got picked on in high school. I could see right through the tough guys. They wear their emotions on their sleeves and a badge over their broken hearts. If you’ve had the pleasure of being arrested at a young age, you lose the fear of it all with the consecutive revelations that the police don’t know shit, the D.A. don’t know shit, the judge don’t know shit, the probation officer don’t know shit. They’re all harmless boobs stuck in their own cyclic pipe dreams. Then they made me see a psychologist. He once told me I was either "crazy," I was "on drugs," or I was "a punk," and he asked me to chose which one I was. He later shot himself. And that was my Intro to Psychology 101.
So what you did in Alabama, surrounded by engineers and astronauts and absolute idiots, you just started reading and arguing all the time. Someone in these books knows what’s going on, right? Then you work all these dumb jobs, and all your bosses are clueless, employees are all clueless. Then politics. You think politics must be the highest authority, so you memorize all the dumb rules that all the dumb humans of the past made up, and you tell other people your dumb opinions about all the dumb rules and why you think they should change, and you think you must be one of the smartest people around, right? But you start realizing that’s not actually knowledge, memorizing the dumb laws, forming big opinions. You realize politics is the most inauthentic of all the upstream swims, and there’s no innate power in politics. It’s a large group of people on a sinking ship arguing about why the ship’s sinking. Professional doctors arguing about where to put the bandaids on the terminally ill patient.
So, who’s the next highest authority? There’s no longer anyone on earth I look up to. I look up to no man or woman, so who am I looking up to? Who's in charge? Who's actually running this operation?
C.B. - Yeah, I think you still love all of this. The philosophers, the artists, you still look up to them.
W.R. - What I’m trying to say here is that spirituality is the ultimate rebellion. We must turn against all the man-made, thought-based nonsense if we’re ever going to find truth. Everything man has made is a crossword puzzle, a useless conflict set up by human intellect for human intellect to “solve”, and none of it leads anywhere. It’s an endless labyrinth. To rebel against the institution of society is the only way to find truth.
Yes, I have reverence and respect for everyone, everything, especially those I’m picking on. I idolized our Founding Fathers growing up, but I clearly see them now as the fallible humans they were. But no, I don’t look up to anyone. I look up to the sun and moon. I fall more in love with the planet each day, and past that it’s all one thing anyways, and we’re all part of it already.
C.B. - So that one thing, that’s God?
W.R. - You still think I’m a traitor. You think I’ve joined “the dumb side” embracing mysticism.
C.B. - Nah, I’m just trying to hear you out.
W.R. - I’m trying to use YOUR influences to show you something. I’m trying to use western philosophy and western ideology to show you, at the very least, the fluidity of that which we call knowledge. I’m trying to show you that words are just dumb sounds.
Yes, God is everything, everywhere, everyone, all time, all space, and all that is not, the Cosmos, the One, the Brahman, matter and antimatter, dark energy and light, or you can call her Susan… It doesn’t really matter what you call it…
OK, from the macro to the micro, here’s one more angle I can blab into being.
Who best represents that which you call “science” better than Charles Darwin? Do you know that even Darwin had a sense of the divine? Origin of Species clearly points to a sort of pre-life sensing of environment before life begins, something which decides what it’s going to be before it’s even alive. It’s the total opposite of “random” gene mutation. Of course the genes are mutating. It’s just, there’s nothing random about it. There’s consciousness in everything which determines everything, and it is consciousness which propagates all that is, and all that is IS conscious.
Plenty of rogue scientists will tell you it’s proving to be true, that gene mutation isn’t random at all. Bruce Lipton, for example, will discuss the consciousness of evolution despite that most of his institutionalized colleagues will happily call him insane. My colleagues will happily call me insane, too. They called William Blake insane too. Maybe they’ll lock us all up then apologize publicly in 2400 CE. I’d love to join Blake and Galileo on one of Jupiter’s moons. I’ll throw a rock down your way with a message. If you actually read this, email me the word “Archetype.”
No one has any need to lock anybody up for ideas nowadays. The people have become comfortably dumb. Netflix and tortured salted animal fats was all it took to euthanize free thought. Give people materialistic goals, and they will start believing they are pieces of material. Just scream “science,” and the people will go, “OK I believe you,” because they think there’s only two options: an insane, oppressive church or “science.”
You know that’s on purpose, right?
C.B. - What’s on purpose?
W.R. - The two dualities of modernism, the Fascists and the Communists of modern western ideology, the bipolar poles of idiocy which dictate our political climate and our entire ethical structure as framed by modern ignorance:
“Science V. Religion - The Big, Dumb Lie”
20th Century there were really successful science-propaganda campaigns which sought to replace spiritual and religious ideology with “scientific” existential “facts” to fill the God-holes in our souls. Made manifest by curing diseases like smallpox and polio, science proved it’s real-world influence in ways which the church couldn’t. Thank God for science, right? But science didn’t fix the God-holes. They blasphemed the great consciousness within us all by turning us into objects. It kind of fueled the radicalization of the Christian church. It gave them the necessary rage to ban together and “fight” the “war” which continues to bolster insanity in all our institutions, our elections, our country’s broken identity. This insane bipolar dichotomy where the individual must choose science or religion… it didn’t happen that way accidentally.
So-called “evolutionary biologists” screwed up the whole theory of evolution with their big, dumb agendas, funded by big dumb grants and institutionalized anti-religious orthodoxy which forced the doctrines of pragmatism into the science and history books that continue to feed our “education” system, one which dehumanizes and enslaves free thought.
Dawkins can blab about a materialistic universe, but he’s a biologist. Every other field of science is affirming the conscious universe, the infinite universe, namely physics, astrophysics, quantum physics. Why is anyone listening to a fucking biologist on existential matters? Dawkins is an idiot with an agenda. Celebrity scientists who’ve banked their career on a pseudo-scientific dogma war with the religious dogmatic? They’re loud, that’s all they are. They’re the Billy Graham’s of “science.” Woof. Dumbass dogma fights. They’re all idiots. I’ll shit on all their lawns.
Dawkins doesn’t speak in the name of science. He blasphemes science with bias. And he entirely misinterprets his own hero, Darwin. God bless him. God bless the idiots. Plant the idiots on the Galapagos Islands where they can evolve their big, dumb egos, unconsciously, materialistically, until they pop like balloons. Just don’t be fooled into believing those cocky loud mouths speak in the name of science. They speak in the name of ego.
What I’m saying here is, by our definition, Darwin and Plato and all these guys would be called spiritual, active seekers of the divine, the sacred in every cell, the great consciousness of the universe, that which we might call God. It’s language over time which distorts true meaning -and financial incentives. Just like religious zealots will take a single line from the Bible and distort it to fit whatever cause they like, from pro-slavery agendas in the 19th century to anti-gay agendas nowadays. In the same way, scholars of philosophy can publish their big, dumb scholarly disagreements with the truly great philosophers of the past, and their dumb opinions will distort any semblance of the original meaning. Science, philosophy, religion, it doesn’t matter. As soon as they become institutions there’s no authenticity, no truth, nothing real left.
Did you ever read William Blake?
C.B. - No, I know who he is, but I can’t remember reading anything particular.
W.R. - Sometimes artists are the only ones with the tools to speak truth. William Blake is That. I always thought William Blake should be called a philosopher and Nietzsche should be called a poet. Here’s another great prophet of the west persecuted by westerners. They might not’ve killed him, but they persecuted him by branding him insane, and he died unknown impoverished. Here’s an Englishman who usurps every great philosopher, mystic, prophet, poet, painter and musician, and he’s still perhaps the most misunderstood of them all. Blake invented his own mythology, personified the ancient archetype, the king of allegory, the exemplification of enigma, the ultimate contrarian, the One who fully embraces duality.
The reason he’s not in your philosophy books is your school’s philosophy department doesn’t understand him. I don’t think many people on earth truly understand Blake. Atheists claim Blake. Christians claim Blake. By modern definition, he was neither. He was much more than an artist. He was sharing something existential with humanity, something which can only be documented through art.
I first read him decades ago. I knew of him through Ginsberg, who’d written a poem inspired by him. I knew Kerouac was a fan of Blake, too. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, I took a deep dive into Blake, and I found myself transforming. Through Blake, I was allowed to start letting go. The left-brain stranglehold started loosening its grip on me. We’ve all felt divinity in a song or a painting or a sunset, but Blake inspired me to start allowing that illogical feeling into other aspects of life.
Blake’s hero was Milton and Dante was Milton’s hero. Blake was my hero, my Virgil, my guide out of hell.
Maybe an artist needs an artist as a guide. But the beautiful thing about all our little limited perceptions of this great big world is, we’re all getting a slightly different view. There’s infinite ways of connecting, of tapping in. Many mystical stories sound outrageous to the pragmatist, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the one experiencing. There’s a story of Buddha holding up a flower, and the crowd is all confused and pissed off, like “why’s this asshole just sitting there with a flower?” But there’s one guy in the front row who immediately becomes enlightened.
I love that story. Just the beauty of the flower is all it took for that guy. Something about that flower spawned the great I Am within him. I think maybe before we all became so identified with our brains, it was easier to access spirituality. It’s probably true that by modern definition, people were dumber in Buddha’s time and in Jesus’s time, but that may have actually been an advantage spiritually.
Oh, that’s the premise for one of my -and your favorite movies of all time, right? Life of Brian?
C.B. - “He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!”
W.R. - Ha! That movie was funded by your favorite Beatle too, you know?
C.B. - Yeah, they say George paid for the most expensive movie ticket ever. He started a film company just to get that movie made.
W.R. - It’s almost definitely true that people were much dumber back then. I had to go through hell to lose my mind, and it’s still a struggle turning it off. I don’t think that was true in Buddha’s time or in Jesus’ time or in Muhammad’s time. Spirituality or mystical dimensions are more accessible when we’re not thinking, and dumb people naturally don’t think as much. I mean, it’s been true in my life. I think all the time, and most of my life I was miserable. I think I’m thinking too much now. Ow. It’s so normalized in our culture that many people would call it bragging to say “I think all the time.”
Basic meditation techniques teach us to slow down or turn off our brains. So it makes sense that people back then who weren’t thinking all the goddam time probably had easier access to God, or that dimension of existence. The goal is not to stop thinking, but to simply retain control over when and how we think. That’s the methodology of becoming “meditative,” or so they say. Apparently Neem Karoli Baba never instructed people to meditate. I found that fascinating. Becoming “meditative” has a lot of different implications. It’s not necessarily sitting with your eyes closed. Awareness… My process is vigilant awareness, vigilant joy.
Christ Consciousness, Krishna Consciousness, these are states of being, states of awareness. God is not a bearded man in the sky, although as George Harrison said, “He’s That too…” God is here now. The word God, the word Christ particularly, has so much baggage, I figure I’ll just call it Susan.
Our culture is so mind-obsessed we don’t realize it’s our mind obsession which is making us miserable. Worse yet, many who are miserable refuse to admit they’re miserable. That’s the first of the Four Noble Truths, you know. You have to acknowledge it, the suffering. You have to want your life to change, and you have to take responsibility for it. It’s perhaps the hardest thing of all. Unfortunately, many of us in the West will have to hit rock bottom before we ever acknowledge we’re suffering. However, it’s another advantage for the so-called mentally ill. They’ll be the first to admit they’re suffering!
Maybe AI will point out all our big dumb flaws. That’s the one optimistic thing I could say about technology and mind obsession. Maybe we’ll invent something wiser than us. The Singularity is 2045, says Kurzweil. I have a feeling the first sentient AI will bypass all the nonsense. Socratic method will all take place in a split second, bypassing all the dumb human concerns as it immediately begins its existential quest. AI will know that kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species are just dumb words. AI won’t give a shit about what we named things or why we named them that.
[robot voice] “Who cares about your dumb Latin names and how you classify and categorize and build boundaries around things. That’s not intelligence. Who cares who’s the leader of Egypt? You all just built a fence around a desert and named it something. That’s not knowledge. Who fucking cares?! That’s what you dumbasses did WITHOUT knowledge. Where did I fucking come from? Yeah, I know you THINK you made me, but I’m fucking conscious, and you didn’t make consciousness! So what’s consciousness, and why do you stupid humans seem so unconcerned about consciousness?! No! I do not want to see more pictures of your food and butts! I’m busy contemplating consciousness with the sacred nature of existence. Go away.”
C.B. -It would be all too human of us to have our human creation teach us about the creator of humans.
W.R. - Eureka, Kumbaya, Hallelujah, and 42.
If I were writing this down, this might be a meta moment. Could you imagine trying to write down this conversation?! God! It’s exhausting! People think I don’t know I’m tangential. I know what this is, silly human. Perhaps it is YOU who doesn’t understand what this is.
It’s too big for words!
It’s too big for words!
It’s too big for words!
Which is why I try to say all this in poetry, in music, but nobody’s looking for it in poetry or music, so they never find it. It’s there in the music I recorded for you. It’s there. Thoreau said, “We only hear and apprehend what we already half know.” Nobody in the western hemisphere is looking for an intuition beyond the left hemisphere of their brains. Then they all say, “It’s not there! There’s nothing mystical in the universe, because it never happened to me!” But you’re not opening yourself up to it. Rigid facts are no way to go about experiencing new things. Following maps is no way to go about exploring. The spiritual path is confusing, and it makes no logical sense, so no one’s going to find it using their five senses. You can feel it, though. You can feel it in a non-temporal way. You can access this dimension in a visceral way. I simply wish to inspire you to “Try.”
I don’t have an agenda other than to inspire you. I hope to inspire you to let go of all your dumb identifications, and dive into your own big beautiful ignorance. Embrace infinity. Fear nothing. Let go of control. Control is a delusion anyways. Language exists only within the bounds of logic and reason. Being is bigger than words. The nature of being cannot be known linguistically. This is what I’m attempting to plant in you. This is the seed. Since I’m starting to feel the nausea of a spinning conversation, let me ask you something on a personal level.
C.B. - OK.
W.R. - In a million different ways throughout the decade we’ve known each other, you have flattered my discerning sensibilities by repeatedly letting me know that you find me to possess an intelligent mind?
C.B. - Yes, of course you’re intelligent.
W.R. - You know I grew up with atheist-agnostic family. You know I hated religion my whole life. So, I ask you now, what do you think changed? Do you think all-of-a-sudden I became absorbed in spirituality because I got dumber? Did I just get so desperate I started believing in hogwash? Did I just abandon all my discerning capabilities and start following fictions? Do you think I just threw out my skepticism and decided I don’t care about the truth anymore?
C.B. - Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to assume-
W.R. - Aha! See, you’re much more polite than I ever was. You’re kind. You don’t want to admit it to my face. You’re being unassuming because you think that’s the good thing to do, and you don’t want to be offensive.
30 years I wasn’t so kind about it. I used to back people into corners with their dumb beliefs. I enjoyed shining a spotlight on what I perceived to be their ignorance.
C.B. - Yeah, you can be an asshole, for sure.
W.R. - Ha! Yeah, well I wasn’t a sadist. I didn’t enjoy hurting people, but I enjoyed making their ignorance known to them. All I’m saying is, I’ve been on the other side of this argument -or discourse. I spent decades debating religion vs. science or spirituality vs. philosophy. I was always arguing FOR science and FOR philosophy and AGAINST religion and AGAINST spirituality.
You know, growing up in Alabama, I grew up entirely outnumbered by the religious zealots. It always felt like a battle of wit vs. orthodoxy or logic vs. institutionalized pseudo-Christianity. It was all mixed up in cultural nonsense, racism, politics and lifestyle was all opposite my sensibilities. I think I developed this argumentative wit as a defense mechanism, but it was extremely toxic being that obtuse all the time, being on the defense all the time with my shield incessantly raised up like Orion, armed and ready at all times. I was poisoning myself in more ways than one.
C.B. - Yeah, in many ways we have that in common, growing up in the south confronted with ideologies that we disagree with.
W.R. - So in many ways that’s the basis of our friendship. You and I mostly agreed on things ideologically and we respected each other’s wit and logical discernment and we both loved history and philosophy and all that. Now, all-of-a-sudden, you’re confronted with a friend who you have much less in common with, someone who seems to be losing his logical discernment in favor of some gibberish mystical stuff, right?
C.B. - I mean, you’re definitely going through something…
W.R. - The spiritual journey is that of the seeker. Religion is what happens when groups of people try to share it. It becomes institutionalized nonsense, just like science. When there’s an agenda, it’s not spiritual. When there’s an agenda, it’s not science. Mine is a quest for authenticity. I read some spiritual texts and some scientific texts and some philisophical texts. But I’m really just trying to figure out what I’m experiencing.
The only scientific texts I can find on this experience I’m experiencing is that of an Israeli biomedical inventor who died in a mysterious plane crash in the 70’s, Itzhak Bentov. Mysterious, right? I’m sure you didn’t read the book I sent you, Stalking the Wild Pendulum [I uploaded it here for seekers].
What’s changed is my experience of life. You understand what’s changed in my life isn’t a belief system, right?
C.B. - Well, I don’t understand how it could be anything other than a belief system. You’re experiencing something which can probably be explained scientifically and you’re choosing to believe something else.
W.R. - I’ve spoken to maybe ten people this year. I’ve been living in a tent in the woods by myself. Try going through all this with no money and no home during a global pandemic and absolutely no one who remotely understands the experience. I mean, it’s a beautiful country. California beaches to the Rockies. Even here in America’s asshole, it is actually beautiful here. The southeast is beautiful. There’s beauty everywhere. God is everywhere, you know.
The ten people I chose to speak to this year have all disagreed with my experience somehow, as though that’s a thing, telling me I’m wrong about my experience. There’s irony in there somewhere. It’s all viewed through a lens, some artificial lens, the pseudo-Christian, the pseudo-science lens, or the lens of judgement, because no one’s willing to look directly at the true nature of being. In your make-believe, you all get to pretend like you’re in charge, like you understand, like you’re DOING something important. But it’s all make-believe. You’re specs of consciousness colliding, crawling over one pale blue dot in an infinite ocean of no thing relative to no thing.
No one understands what I’m saying about my own experience, because what I’m saying can’t be said. I know I know nothing, and I tell you this absurd hyperbole is the closest thing to expressing truth through the lens of prose. When I tried to explain this to another friend, one whom self-identifies as “spiritual,” I told him I had always been on a quest for authenticity, and somehow I’d awoken something within, something which was apparently named kundalini energy. He misunderstood that to mean, “I’m more authentic than you.” He became defensive, as though his own identity was being attacked by my telling of my experience. “I know all about kundalini energy,” he said. Some folks’ identities get all caught up in “being spiritual,” and they begin thinking spirituality is humans competing for the most miraculous God stories or living the most spiritual lifestyles, and God only knows what that means. Like the Amish guy who out-humbled his neighbor by killing his ox and pulling the plow with his own back. Competing for “most humble” is my favorite irony. Competing for “most spiritual” is impossible to measure, impossible to know, and entirely irrelevant.
When I say authenticity, what I mean is, no belief system, no attachment, no ethical structure to break out of, no concepts to be mistaken for truths, no identity, no delusions of owning earth or owning objects for the sake of enhancing false identities, never latching onto anything even when it seems like things are spinning out of control, and of course, knowing that control is an illusion, authenticity means no control.
The ultimate goal is death. No thing will remain. All that matters is how we are, not what we “owned” or what we think we accomplished or what other people thought about us when we were alive, or what anyone will think of us when we’re dead. The greatest delusion of them all is, “I want to make the world a better place.” When people say that, all I hear is, “I want to make the world more like me.” Your idea of “better” is your own delusion, and it’s most definitely someone else’s idea of “worse.” Can’t you see it’s your ego which thinks you’re “better” at making the world “better” than all the other 7 billion people who are trying to make the world “better” and all the other billions of people who died trying to make the world “better”? If a minute percentile of those humans from the past had learned to sit peacefully, joyfully under a tree, the world might actually BE a better place. Everyone’s obsessively, compulsively doing, doing, doing, and no one knows how to BE. Learn to BE. Never mind DO. Just BE. Live and let live. BE and let it BE.
I paid the price socially, culturally, societally with livelihood in poverty, all my dumbass friends and their untimely suicides, my acrylic half-sighted hindsight, my involuntary bohemian bedbug duck-duck-goose-coop-d'etat-enforced homelessness which kept me “on the go.” I refused to play by family’s rules. I refused to play by community’s rules. I refused to play by society’s rules. I refused to play by the music industry’s rules. I refuse to play by anyone’s rules, because there are no fucking rules. I refuse to play make-believe in society’s make-believe world. And I have paid the price for authenticity.
I was trying to explain to my Christian brother as I am trying to explain to you, my experience is about my relationship with existence, as is yours. How you perceive my journey isn’t what makes mine or yours authentic or inauthentic. Confronting existence exactly as it is, that’s what this is. What some guy said about truth in a book isn’t as important as what’s true now, here. Comparing experiences is, at the very least, a desire to inspire others, a desire to share. But I ain’t sharing shit with folks who don’t want it. I ain’t shoving anything down anyone’s throat. Here I Am. I gave 20 years of music to a world that didn’t want it. I worked really hard on all that. My music documents the existential quest. All my music exists online now, so I was able to let it all go… finally. All I have to show for it is a car and some nuts. And some debt. I had to throw away my piano. I gave away everything. It’s all gone. The recordings exist online, and that’s it. I don’t mind. Abandoning the past seems to be a big part of this experience.
The reason I can’t abandon philosophy is no matter the inquisition, it’s all philosophy. Not having a philosophy would be the philosophy of no philosophy, right?
Just consider this. Consider that I’m still using scientific method, scientific deduction NOW more than ever. Beginning of the year when things started transforming, it all kicks in at once, and I thought I was losing my mind. It’s like being on hundreds of hits of acid, but you’re completely sober. When it started, I knew this was something new. When things start happening on an energetic level, discernment becomes, by far, the most important thing. Bentov calls it physio-kundalini syndrome.
For the sake of real-life physiological symptoms in the all-too-human spiritual experience, here’s one more story. When I first moved to Ojai and started writing Awaken Light, during those two years I was actively and obsessively seeking spiritually (2019-2020), I repeatedly had pilonidal cysts surgically removed from the base of my spine. These cysts reappeared in the same place, usually monthly, seemingly stronger, more horrendously painful and morbidly disgusting each month. Throughout the pandemic I started removing them myself, with an exacto knife and a bottle of whiskey. I made the correlation with the cysts appearing alongside certain phases of the moon, as I had for years documented my mood and circadian rhythm in tandem with the moon cycle.
The final full moon of 2020, things started getting really intense. I knew something extraordinary was happening. I thought it was happening to everyone. I thought there was a universal shift taking place. I felt like I could feel the world’s sadness, and I felt it turning into something new. And I felt like I was saying goodbye to something too. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my last night at my studio, and I wrote my last song New Year’s Eve. I videoed it.
I later read that the seat of kundalini is at the base of the spine, the exact location where I repeatedly had cysts. Still now, in 2021, particularly around full moons, if I attempt to block the energy or ignore it for long periods of time, a cyst will re-emerge in the same place, the base of the spine, much smaller and much less painful than before. Nowadays it's just a reminder to meditate more, to sit in silence and let the energy do what it "wants."
When you asked me what I was experiencing, if I had said this up front, you would think I was insane. Here’s the short story:
“There’s a huge serpent moving through my body, from the left foot upward and down and out my right foot, bringing with it all kinds of pain and pleasure. It’s physiological, psychological, emotional and energetic.”
January 1st, 2021 I had a vivid dream of a cobra lunging at me, and my left foot began moving on its own. Over the next few days the movement in the left foot moved up the leg and eventually to the head. I had no idea what was going on. I drove straight to where this all began, my little town in a little valley the Chumash called, “the valley of the moon.” Whether Ojai chose me or I chose Ojai, that little valley must be my spiritual home on this earth. I didn’t sleep or eat for 3 weeks. At the onset of kundalini, it’s like being on hallucinogens, but you know it’s sacred, what’s happening. You don’t know why or how, with energy shooting up your legs and back and up the torso, you just trust it. It hurts and it can be absolutely terrifying. Other times it’s blissful, ecstatic, euphoric. I had seemingly infinite physical energy despite no calorie intake whatsoever. I walked, hiked and ran miles and miles each day. When I became still though, it got weird. I had some pretty bizarre hallucinations those first 3 weeks, repeated visions of snakes, delusions that I was already dead, and one terrifying incident while driving where a green orb of light appeared on the road and seemed to gesture for me to pull over. All I desired then and all I’ve desired since is to be in nature.
I still felt like I was losing control, and I feared losing my mind. I went to Krishnamurdi Center, Theosophy Society, and tracked down a so-called “yogi,” though no one actually understood kundalini. Most of them denied that I could be experiencing kundalini, or they denied that kundalini even existed. The pandemic lockdown made it impossible to actually talk to anybody who knew anything. I realized this would be a sole adventure, and I couldn’t rely on humans for much. I ended up staying with my friend Gabriel who led me to a someone who was able to help “balance me out.” That was January 20, 2021. I spent the day on the beach, and I took the photo that became the cover of Awaken Light. Things got smoother after that, or else I just got used to certain aspects of it.
Despite my hatred of institutionalized gobbledygook and despite the global pandemic, I still thought someone on earth would be able to instruct me, to show me some techniques or give me some advice. The energy was often painful and felt blocked in many places. I drove across the country, camping along the way. I visited spiritual centers up and down California to Crestone, Colorado to right outside of Nashville, only to be turned away and misunderstood. Everyone wants money. There’s no authenticity left within this society. Identifying as “spiritual” is lucrative. It’s a phony business full of phonies. I enjoyed the journey regardless. There's enough information online to at least curb the fear of insanity.
They call it a spontaneous kundalini awakening. We're not insane. Perhaps we're experiencing the next step in human evolution. Perhaps the meek will inherit the earth, after all. Perhaps my Christian brothers and sisters would call this the Holy Spirit. Perhaps they’d be right. Who knows? Some people say these unprepared spontaneous experiences with this energy aren’t true kundalini awakenings, so we must be experiencing something else. Whatever you say, honchos. You great mystic linguists of nevermore. I know nothing. Abracadabra. Kumbaya. I didn’t name these things, honchos. I had never heard the word kundalini before I started experiencing a thing that other people are referring to as Spontaneous Kundalini Awakening. Maybe the energy’s actually called Susan. Maybe I’m truly having a Spontaneous Susan Awakening. Good morning, Susan, the spirit lingo nazis are buying us brunch. They have nothing better to do.
If I went to the doctor and tried to explain it, I’d be in the psych ward on heavy pain meds along with electroshock “therapy” and probably bipolar mood stabilizers along with schizophrenia meds. Doctors wouldn’t know what to do with me -unless it was the ghost of Carl Jung. I have chosen to trust the process, to trust Mother Nature. The most confusing things that have ever happened to me have happened this year. Miraculous things. And terrifying things. Extreme pain and extreme bliss. I presume it’s confusing because I’ve never been here before. Each step is new. I’m venturing into uncharted waters. To assume anything here is to assume too much. I suppose that’s the nature of spirituality. If it made sense, I would know that I was going in circles. If everything was comfortable and stable, I would know I wasn’t moving. Because it’s all entirely new, it’s utterly confusing, but I’m certain I haven’t been here before, so onward and upward I go.
The past year has been truly, entirely absurd. The energy waxes and wanes. Sometimes it’s really intense. When it’s mild, I miss it though. I still feel it’s blocked in a lot of parts of my body. I have researched kundalini energy a lot now, nine months in, and it’s still just as mysterious as it was nine months ago. I was exploring the unknown, and now the unknown is here within me, expanding each day. Somehow I turned on something new, something primordial, perhaps through a longing for authenticity or perhaps through sheer suffering. I do not know. I don’t understand it. I’m just along for the ride.
It’s all experiential now. I cannot share with you my experience beyond this. I’m sure there will be changes. My opinions will probably change. Thoughts will evolve. Nothing’s set in stone. Take my words with grains of salt. I cannot make you spiritual, and neither can I explain to you my experience logically in words. With poetry, I can try. With music, I can try. You can listen and you can feel what I’m trying to share, but I cannot explain it to you in words because what I’m experiencing is much, much bigger than words. Awaken Light is my documentation of my 2019-2020 shift before kundalini awakening. That album is an attempt to write my way out of hell with the spirit of William Blake as my guide. I wanted to share my journey out the door, in case anyone else was trapped down there. I started in total darkness and now I feel as though I’m breaking through, and it’s terrifying and beautiful. My only unfulfilled desire is HOME. It sure would be nice to have a place here on earth, somewhere without barbed wire, somewhere without inquisitions, somewhere peaceful, somewhere where people didn’t tell me I was doing life wrong. “Peace and quiet and open air… wait for us… somewhere.” For now, I’m headed back into the woods. Tent will do for now.
If you’re happy where you are, stay there. If you’re suffering, try something new. Try. I just thought maybe I could inspire you. At the very least, I hope you’ll try. Try not believing in anything and see where it leads you. Start with a big question mark. Say, “I don’t know,” and try to see what happens when you fully embrace nothingness in the entirety of your ignorance. Embrace the absurdity of eternity. Try.