In presenting ultimate, or, as he names it here, “perfect knowledge” (the Realization that we are not now, and never have been, a separate ego-self), in the dramatic circumstance of the incarceration and scapegoating of the one who reveals that truth, Adi Da is able to explore the most devastating problematique of human culture: our unconscionable, insane habit of destroying the very people whose help we most desperately need. In his The Scapegoat Book we are brought to confront, in a manner that freely alternates the excruciating and the sublime, the deluded, willful, narcissistic postures whereby we mock and betray those truly great individuals we otherwise pretend to venerate. The tragedy, of course, is that in so doing we nullify our own best means of freedom and liberation as well.

Adi Da spontaneously composed The Scapegoat Book over a period of six weeks, in October and November, 2005, while in residence at his northern California Hermitage-Sanctuaries, Tat Sundaram and The Mountain Of Attention, in Humboldt and Lake counties, respectively. On January 14, 2006, in conjunction with the Da Orpheum Theatre Guild, he read the work at the Da Orpheum Theatre, which at the time was located at the latter Sanctuary. Like most of those present for this extraordinary event, I found it to be both a transcendental spiritual initiation and the single most searing theatrical experience of my life. The Scapegoat Book is literary drama of the very highest order.

The Scapegoat Book is the second of Adi Da’s Da Orpheum trilogy, three astonishing masterworks that, taken together, chronicle the life story and spiritual teachings of the infant sage and destined Avatar Raymond Darling (etymologically, “the precious light of the world”). Although designed to be read in sequence as a single parable “Told by Means of a Self-Illuminated Illustration of the Totality of Mind”, each work also stands on its own. Through his trilogy, Adi Da brings together, reforms, and completes the three great streams of world culture: Oriental (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist) spirituality’s ultimate wisdom of non-dual Self-Realization, Western civilization’s Orphic quest to rescue the beloved from death’s annihilation, and the existential and postmodern philosophers’ radical subversion of the bourgeois ego and its faux culture.

To carry the full weight of this epochal artistic/cultural intervention, Adi Da has had to invent out of whole cloth three new complex literary genres. If the first work in the trilogy, The Mummery Book, is at once a Bildungsroman, a quest romance, a paradox-ridden spiritual odyssey, a comedy, an opéra bouffe, a satyr’s play, a farce, a passion play, and, a colossally unevitable (or unnecessary) tragedy, and the third, The Happenine Book, is Raymond Darling’s own written, spoken, and illustrated chronicle of the magic, trials, humor, perfect wisdom, and both solemn and ecstatic doings of his early life and teaching work, then in The Scapegoat Book Adi Da allows himself the singular concentration of a fugue—a complex countrapuntal weaving together of the sublime and the absurd, written for two voices and a single Witness.

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Adi Da adapts philosophy’s venerable dialogue form to create an extended dramatic conversation between the Avataric Sage Raymond Darling and his self-proclaimed disciple (and unconfessed captor), the grotesquely obese “Great Fool” Evelyn Disk. Through their discussion of the nature and requirements of ultimate Realization of the non-dual Divine Reality, Adi Da ventures nothing less than to initiate us—if only for the brief time of its performance—into the highest truths of Divine Self-Realization, while simultaneously confronting us with the hypocrisies, false views, delusions, and outright lies whereby we would falsify, make a scapegoat of, and ultimately destroy the bearer and means of that very Gift.
Thus, The Scapegoat Book performs a function in relation to The Mummery Book and The Happenine Book much the same as the eighteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita (the “bible” of Hinduism)—in which Krishna has the Warrior-Prince Arjuna step aside from his epochal battle with the Kauravas for an extended moment to consider the essence of spiritual truth—does for that book. In both works, the central issue at hand is our willingness to renounce the entire patterned conceit that is our egoity in direct relationship to the Realizer, whose blessing guidance and grace we judge to be the sole and absolutely necessary means of our spiritual salvation. By itself, however, such renunciation is not sufficient for Realization. Without an awakening to perfect knowledge, renunciation becomes mere ascetic self-denial. Thus, “the necessary circumstance of Truth—Self-Revealed, by Avatar”  it is only found “as perfect re-coincidence, between the all of true renunciation and the What that is, alone, true liberation, in the Self-“Bright” singularity of perfect-knowledge-only here.” One glaring difference between the two epics, however, is that the Bhagavan Gita’s Arjuna is a magnificently disciplined nobleman who has spent his life in preparation for his moment of testing, while this work’s interlocutor, Evelyn Disk, is a supremely self-indulgent spiritual poseur who, were it not for the fact that we live in the “End-Time” of universal cultural dissolution, would have otherwise never even be given access to the true teaching.

In point of fact, Adi Da Samraj bases The Scapegoat Book on a classic text of early Advaita Vedanta, the Ashtavakra Gita. Although he has long viewed the Ashtavakra Gita as perhaps the foremost of but a handful of traditional spiritual texts that epitomize the truth of transcendent Consciousness Itself, the author had never been satisfied with any of its English translations, including the version published by The Dawn Horse Press, in 1982, to which he contributed a brilliantly illuminating preface. Rather than simply offer his own new translation of the text, however, Adi Da decided to absorb and freely render its first sixteen chapters into the corresponding chapters of The Scapegoat Book. In the process, the venerable scripture receives a complete, and rather surprising, makeover. 

Adi Da is justly renowned for his free renderings of passages from traditional texts, which always seem to improve on the original while serenely divining and preserving their deepest sense. Again and again while preparing this introduction, I found myself highlighting one and yet another passage in The Scapegoat Book that seemed to me to exemplify this point. They became so many that I can make my case almost by choosing at random. Compare, for example, the Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter 10, verse 2:

Look upon friends, lands, wealth, houses, wives, presents, and other such marks of good fortune, as a dream or a juggler’s show, lasting only a few days.

with Adi Da’s rendition in Chapter 10, verse 3 of his book:

Whatever can be desired, or, by means of seeking, actively achieved, is an ephemera, a temporary appearance, that quickly and inevitably passes out of life and sight. As if by a cruel magician’s trick, the heart’s companions come and go. All things and others of delight or love—whether friend, or lover, or acquired wealth, or property, or valuables of any kind—all are the brief diversions of the daily days, and all are dreamed away in a single, sudden night of inadvertence in the while. This fleshly cutted insult, so harshly indented by the virulent molecule of known desire, must make the knower know itself—and instantly, and perfectly so.

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Nevertheless, Adi Da’s remarkable appropriation of the Ashtavakara Gita goes much farther and deeper than these profound expansions. What in the Ashtavakra Gita is presented as a respectful colloquy between two Realized individuals, the Sage Ashtavakra and his nobly-born disciple, King Janaka, becomes in The Scapegoat Book a complex and highly charged dramatic dialogue between the Avataric Great Sage Raymond Darling and his tormentor, the decidedly ignoble (and unRealized) Evelyn Disk. When appealing to a spiritual master for guidance and blessing our manner of approach itself reveals everything about us. Throughout The Scapegoat Book, Adi Da laminates this critical, most central dimension of the actual occasion of spiritual teaching via strikingly original theatrical dialogue in which Evelyn’s transparently hypocritical pseudo-offerings are rewarded with the Great Sage’s excoriating retorts—in all of recorded literature surely the wittiest, most biting invective ever visited upon a purported spiritual aspirant (and certainly never before from one who all the while extends his hand in tearfully compassionate friendship). Here we are not only lifetimes away from the rarified amiability of the Ashtavakra Gita, but also from postmodernism’s infamous elevation of text over the author.  As with its two companion texts, The Mummery Book and Happenine, in The Scapegoat Book the existential authenticity of the speaker is the final guarantor of the verity of his message. Thus, even the truest wisdom spoken by Evelyn Disk becomes false because he himself is false. Herein lies the key to understanding much of the action in the entire Da Orpheum trilogy. In The Mummery Book Adi Da summarized the matter this way.

It is the True religion! Yes! But, made to be un-True! It is the True religion—falsified by the ego-mind of nature’s “Everyman”.

The ego-“I” takes Truth in hand, and makes It die, there—as a Captive Thing! And, by that ever-tightening grasp of talking-mind’s own hand, the Truth becomes, not the Living Light of Is—but the Captive Slave! The Divine Slave—purchased by the mongering ego-“I”! The Imprisoned Slave—forever confined, to do all that is required by Everyman!

As with today’s crop of pseudo-gurus who endlessly misunderstand, reduce, and repackage the teachings of genuine Adepts, Evelyn Disk also betrays himself throughout The Scapegoat Book by issuing confessions of spiritual enlightenment that are riddled with tell-tale mistakes. While reading them, therefore, we need to remain alert, lest we fall for the same errors as Raymond Darling’s glib antagonist. Those mistakes, or false views, are not merely Evelyn’s idiosyncratic faults. He is the bearer of a now globally-extended array of personal, cultural, religious, and even esoteric spiritual conceits, creeds, dispositions, and practices that constitute and exemplify our species’ habitual modes of failed seeking. Thus, in the various chapters of The Scapegoat Book Adi Da addresses not only Evelyn Disk’s evident “talking-school” preference for personal indiscipline, along with his insincerity, malevolence, and “greed, gluttony, and lust”, but also Disk’s advocacy of misguided points of view that perennially gather legions of adherents into enduring schools of thought. In one chapter this might be Evelyn’s Nietzschean homage to a groundless “play” of meaningless appearances. In another it might be the delusions inspired by his yogic introversion upon the brain core. Everything short of truly perfect knowledge is, like history itself, the nightmare from which humanity is trying to awake. The problem is that we chronically remain the committed advocates of the very propositions we most need to critically understand and thereby transcend.

In the final four chapters of The Scapegoat Book (as well as in the “Early Word” and “Late Word” sections that frame the work), Adi Da takes leave of the Ashtavakra Gita to offer his own seminal writings on both the great transition beyond egoity (“the illusion of relatedness”) to Divine Enlightenment and, thereafter, the ultimate post-Enlightenment event that he calls “Divine Translation”.  From this perspective, the author’s free rendering of the Ashtavakra Gita can be seen as the setting of kindling for a Divinely “Bright” dharma-fire never before seen in world literature. Thus, despite the ancient text’s premonitory fullness, that sovereign ultimacy (which, again, begins to unfold only after the event of Divine Enlightenment) could only have been revealed by the Avataric Sage Raymond Darling, an implicit confession that the creative artist and his creation are one and the same.  Many people regard Adi Da as a uniquely great spiritual, philosophical, literary, and artistic genius. Perhaps now they will begin to more deeply ponder the curious fact that even today our vastly well-informed world yet remains almost completely unaware of his existence. The Scapegoat Book can also be read as a clear brief as to how and why this is so.

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The action in The Scapegoat Book unfolds on a single day on the grounds of the State Mental Facility at God’s End to which Evelyn, in The Mummery Book, had Raymond committed after the latter refused to play the role of figurehead in Evelyn’s self-aggrandizing religious charade. Wandering in the forest at Dreamer Circle, Raymond had chanced upon Evelyn teaching disciples a tissue of consoling religious lies purportedly based upon Raymond’s early life story, but which were in fact an utter falsification of his actual life and teachings. Caught by Raymond in the act of selling his credulous acolytes promises of an impossible, vicarious salvation, Evelyn quickly tries to recover by programing the young sage into his act, but then goes on to alternately mimick and mock him. Raymond’s unwillingness to acquiesce to the Great Fool’s expropriation and gross revision of his own true teaching seals his fate. He is to be made the scapegoat for Evelyn’s and his followers’ refusal to accept Raymond’s gift of Realization by Divine Grace—which refusal is the inevitable consequence of their unwillingness to pay the spiritual renunciate’s coin of authentic devotion, self-discipline, and constant attendance upon perfect knowledge that is its necessary daily price.

Although perfectly well aware that Evelyn would prefer him dead so that he can return to his business of teaching his “Raymondite” revision of the great sage’s uncompromising way of perfect knowledge and self-renunciation, in The Scapegoat Book the now incarcerated Raymond nonetheless accepts Evelyn’s “gift” of a poisoned apple and in return counters his captor’s every delusion and lie with the consummate teaching of Consciousness Itself and the consummate Way of devotional love and service to the one who embodies and transmits It—the adept’s Grace being the inner teaching of any religion worthy of the name. All this “mummery” is duly witnessed and recorded by Meridian Smith, the always delightfully attired divine angel who miraculously reappeared throughout The Mummery Book whenever the questing young Raymond Darling needed initiatory guidance and blessing. Here Meridian merely plays the role of fair Witness as Raymond expends his own final life’s-breath in a futile effort to move his “super-criminal” tormentor to abandon his wanton path.

The anthropologist Rene Girard has offered us a far-reaching and compelling explanation of the scapegoat phenomenon, placing it at the very center of human psychology, culture, and religion. Through his study of the novels of some of western literature’s greatest literary geniuses—the likes of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Joyce—he teased out the common theme that human desire is fundamentally imitative at its core, and that human passion is utterly bound up in jealous and envious rivalries between presumed peers. His argument here is akin to the master-slave dialectic expounded by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind, which, as relayed through the twentieth century philosopher Alexander Kojève, was to have enormous influence on postwar Continental thought, especially psychoanalysis. That human relations are mostly a dramatized struggle for prestige is now a settled fixture of contemporary letters. Jacques Lacan, the globally influential French psychoanalyst who absorbed Hegel’s dialectic into that discipline, argued that our self-image is forged in a circumstance of interpersonal imitation and rivalry, marking as aggressive at its core our quest for identity and our perpetual search for an impossible (because already lost) object. The psychoanalytic understanding of the human psyche was fleshed out by the work of the influential British child analyst Melanie Klein, who revealed that the infant’s phantasy life often becomes a tempest of devouring, despoiling, envious rage. 

Girard’s analysis of the scapegoat game complements what both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche found to be the defining characteristic of egoity in the modern age: the dismissive envy, or ressentiment, that however unwittingly drives our collective determination to rid human culture of all superior men and women. Ressentiment is the “leveling” impulse whereby the common man attempts to assuage his mortal anxiety by assuring himself that there really is nothing great to Realize and no one made great by Realizing it. Mockery, slander, and the other tools of the hypocritical ego are its primary weapons. In the words of the German philosopher Constantin Brunner, “Every age knows so much about great men as to know that none of them is one. No age has had a prophet whom it wanted, whom it did not regard as a madman . . . , whom it did not regard as absurd, depraved, malign – as evil incarnate.” At least the people of past centuries paid their saviors the compliment of open opposition. Speaking of the Athenian rejection of Socrates, Kierkegaard pointed out that “the outstanding man was exiled, but everyone understood how dialectical the relationship was, ostracism being a mark of distinction.” He noted that in our more indolent era, in which people are “cowardly and vacillating,” the force of human abstraction permits us to treat the superior man as merely ridiculous and worthy only of being ignored.

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Not that that the targets of human scapegoating are in any way confined to the great alone. To the contrary, as Adi Da makes clear in his final philosophical and spiritual masterwork, The Aletheon, scapegoating is the subtext of virtually every kind of egoic or conventional knowledge. Enlarging upon the famous dictum of one of the ur-texts of Vedantic Hinduism, the Brihadaranyka Upanishad, in which it is said that “Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises” , any and every thing that appears to be objective to us, whether interpersonal or otherwise, is inevitably subject to our fearful ego’s underlying imperative of control:

Ordinary human “knowing” seeks to control (or enclose) its “object”, because the human ego is fearful of being controlled by the “object”—no matter what the “object” is. Ordinary human “knowing” tries to “get the secrets” of the any “object”, so that the “object” can be brought under control (and, at last, destroyed).

Thus, ordinary human “knowing” is the “scapegoat-method”—of enclosing, controlling, and (at last) destroying the “other”. That universally evident “method” pervades the entire human “world”. Indeed, the “scapegoat-ritual” is the fundamental act of human beings—unless it is transcended in and by means of the process of Divine Self-Realization of Reality Itself.

    This tendency becomes most extreme when we come before great spiritual Realizers. Instead of displaying the humility, vulnerability, and need that is our heart’s natural response to their presence, we struggle to assert ourselves. Human history amply bears out C.G. Jung’s observation that “the Self is always a defeat for the ego”. Or, to state the matter in Adi Da’s more pointed formulation, “The ego is at war with its own Help.” Our typical solution to this dilemma is to deprive the teacher and his or her teachings of their necessary bite. We would prefer a comforting, consoling pseudo-spirituality. Although the living spirit does indeed nurture us, we cannot truly receive its sustenance at any real depth without first undergoing a fiery ordeal of suffering and sacrifice. Any truly authentic spiritual teacher must be the instrument of a disillusionment no one gladly endures. Thus, while Buddhism has become something of a fashionable religion in recent years, how many of us engage his dharma with the respectful seriousness implied by Gautama Buddha’s famous simile of the lion?:

Now, monks, whatever animals hear the sound of the roaring of the lion, king of beasts, for the most part they are afraid: they fall to quaking and trembling. Those that dwell in holes seek them: water-dwellers make for the water: forest-dwellers enter the forest: birds mount into the air. (Anguttara-Nikaya) 

Although it is rarely noted these days, from the above alone we should not be surprised that Gautama Buddha himself endured several assassination attempts. Likewise, after he confessed his own oneness with God and dared to offer common people his spiritual baptism, Jesus of Nazareth was duly crucified under color of law (“We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God.” John 19:7). Similarly, because he dares to openly proclaim and then, by offering his transcendental spiritual Grace to all who would avail themselves of It, to actually manifest his own Identity as the “First Room” of Conscious Light, the Avataric Sage Raymond Darling must also be put away—and, finally, done away with.

There is a reason why this pattern of abusing spiritual adepts seems to have become especially acute in our time. In the first edition of his autobiography, The Knee of Listening, Adi Da noted that creativity is “the idol of the West”—an observation amply born out by the past few decade’s worth of motivational speakers. In itself, creative activity is of course a natural, inherent, unproblematic feature of human existence. As with so many other true things, however, when creativity becomes a gospel unto itself we can be sure it has already been subverted to the ego’s agenda. In the edition of The Knee of Listening referenced above, he helps us understand how and why we become so beguiled by compelling but false images of truth:

Narcissus is an idol of creativity, of source.
He is the solar plexus.
He waits outside the heart.
The image he sees in the water is his own heart.
Thus, he sacrifices his heart to it.
The water is his own mind, the plane of all images.

He is the reduction of the world to the form of his own separate person.

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Now we can understand the deepest fear that possesses Evelyn Disk, drives the action of The Scapegoat Book, and seals Raymond Darling’s fate; that is to say, the reason why we yet continue to make even the Heart of Consciousness a hollow eidolon. The entire motive and thrust of our egoic self-enactment is animated by a single fear.  The passage where this is identified begs to be quoted in full:

This knowledge of heart-craft grants responsibility to humankind—but perfect knowledge is a final draft of what was written by the heart. That final, perfect knowledge is a vanishment of heart itself—and all it wrote is flashed to ashes in the Lighted fire of What Stands free where heart once was. One in whom the Conscious Light of perfect knowledge has Awakened where it Stands, is seeming-nullified to an indifference to all what mummery so talented the life before. One who once acted every part of “keenest sharp” of thinking mind, or exemplified all “right behavior” of the socializing kind, or vigored “healthy living” to an excess of success—becomes as if a muted, barkless dog of thinklessness, inert, “desocialized”, immovable from home, and, altogether, worriless about absurd intents, and will not move to buy an any famous wanted-“thing”, or even entertain a foolish guest. Because of fears about the threat to “creativity”—all egos shun and mock and scandalize the wise. Even perfect knowledge is defamed of all its Truth, by those who move by seeking and desire—and would yet find their perfect ending in utopia, imagined in advance, to be forever waiting there, for them, at end of life’s great chain of right consumptions, for which breadless goods and “quality-time” all egos queue forever, in a line.  [emphasis supplied]

    The Scapegoat Book is, in the author’s words, a “Hard! Parable” of the ego’s self-divided struggle with its own Benefactor and with the open secret and great Law of both life and spirit—sacrifice, self-relinquishment, renunciation. Insofar as we fail to recognize Adi Da’s outré caricature of the human ego, Evelyn Disk, as a metaphor for our own spiritual indolence, excess, and bad faith, we will find it more than a little difficult to grasp our present likeness to him. Given that Gautama Buddha occasionally called his first disciples “fools” for their failures of discipline, how can we cavil about being addressed as a “Great Fool” for not only blithely ignoring the unalloyed peril and futility of our natural life, but also for denying our absolute need for the graceful Help of the one who has fulfilled the necessary course we have yet to begin? In a summary discourse given in 1981, Adi Da put the matter this way:

People read the Teaching and they want to be the Gurus of others. They think about the Teaching a little bit and they want to be famous as Adepts. They manage to keep their physical life somewhat straight for six months and they want to be regarded as Avatars! Life is foolishness. This is no time, in any case, to be tolerant of foolishness. The world is mad, and these are dreadful times. Things are not going to be easier in the years ahead. The spiritual process tolerates no fool. The spiritual process itself will spit you out. It is not an easy attainment, but a profoundly difficult affair. Even what you have listened to today has been heard by only a fraction of the human race in all of history. The opportunity to practice is extremely rare, and the fulfillment of practice is practically unknown.

It is important to keep in mind that although the venue of this drama is Raymond Darling’s “First Room”, the domain of the blissful truth of Consciousness Light Itself, the parable encompasses the totality of egoic mind. If The Scapegoat Book is to fulfill its cathartic and edifying function, then, we must allow ourselves the artistic freedom to completely identify with any and every character put before us while also being carried by That which transcends one and all.

There was a moment in the the Da Orpheum Theatre Guild’s inaugural performance of The Scapegoat Book when the full emotional impact of its core truth overwhelmed both author and audience. Known for most of his life as a legendarily life-positive Tantric Spiritual Master, while Adi Da was in the body few, if any, ever fully appreciated the unremitting disconsolation and sorrow that he was obliged to endure in his epochal, Orphic love-embrace of all beings. We were given an extremely rare glimpse of the price of authorship when the playwright came to read verse seven in chapter ten of his book. As Adi Da confessed the unavoidable, heartbreaking truth “of this heartless plane of unrequited inclinations”, his voice suddenly faltered and broke into a near gasp:

It never made a difference, how attached we were—by desire’s hold or seeking’s gain—to all the seeming world of life, and children for the heart, and lovers at the side, and embodiment itself, and pleasures for a little while of here. Intensity of feeling never kept a moment for a time—and all was lost, before another breath could tide our objects back, with the helpless, grasping home of all our cruelly, meanly separated hearts.

    In The Scapegoat Book each of us is called, in language that rivals Shakespeare but at a depth of wisdom that knows no peer, to participate in a fictional dialogue between fictional characters that is entirely purposed to explore our real relationship to the author himself. Mysteriously imbued with Adi Da’s own awakened Consciousness, this great fiction not only breeches the established boundaries between literature and philosophy, but the larger barriers we have erected between these and life itself. It perfectly confronts us with the most essential lessons of life and spirit that we must grasp during our brief passage here on Earth. Like most great art, it is both a caustic and a balm. Granted, such instruction is difficult to endure. Nevertheless, it is one that is absolutely necessary and utterly healing and liberating. And now that we have this book, I confess that I do not now know how I could have hoped to fulfill my spiritual practice without it. Truly, it is a master guide for the perplexed for this and for all future time.

One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe who could be found on America’s streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adepts and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India’s avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores.

Maybe there are legions of Zen alcoholics and the like, and maybe we have lost the ability to see them in this season of imperial hubris, consumer fatigue and existential numbness. But I don’t think so. I know crazy wisdom and saintly madness in men’s eyes when I see it, and I am not seeing it very often in America these days. It has been outlawed by the Republicans and soundly condemned as Devil’s work by the Christian Right.

Of course if the dear reader is one who believes science defines all reality and that men possess no spiritual aspect, then it might be best to turn off the computer right now and go out for a beer or click on another story, because I am of the opposite disposition. So much so in fact that I am convinced things like grace really exist and that mankind is so murderously full of shit because it cannot apply itself to higher laws, laws which must be called spiritual for lack of a better term.

Having cleared the air between you and me (assuming you’re still reading), let me tell you about a rare saintly madman I laid eyes and heart upon recently. He is presently eating very expensive pies and watching television with his dogs in his own personal hell out in Etowah, Tennessee, the former “Rubberized Hair Capital of the World.”

At home in hell

For the past two days Bob D— has lain stupefied in his chlordane insecticide soaked house in Etowah, alternating between near coma and electrifying terror of opening his mail or answering the phone. Chlordane poisoning has destroyed his nervous system, rendered him freakish and weird, and in his own words “with an agonized countenance, a bony ‘horn’ growing out of the middle of my forehead, strange disoriented behavior, and fat. I didn’t get old. I got killed.” And on it goes . . .  “I took my dogs to the vet last week where ‘substance abuse’ on my part was suspected,” he tells me. “Once I got locked out of my car, and the police took me in for drug testing. I’m used to the horror of it all. I noticed in one of your columns that you were struggling to remain objective after watching a video beheading. That’s my life. Early on, I got this ‘view of things.’ I keep asking myself, ‘Why would I, of all people, know these things?’ I have alienated all my friends and relatives. My closest acquaintances know NOTHING about me. And the question lingers always: ‘Why would I, of all people, know these things? Am I just crazy?’”

Home for Bob D— is a sprawling old Victorian ruin on an entire city block, complete with fountains and lighted gardens, with more white fence than the state of Kentucky and covered parking for 10 cars, paved parking for another 20. This is the materialist nightmare of his late father who was raised in a boxcar and obsessed with the American Dream. He advised his wife, in the event of his death, to move immediately “or be ruined financially.” The old man died twenty years ago and his admonishment has become prophecy. The place is a money trap beyond anything yet known, and as Bob carries pills to his 90-plus-year-old mother between his own attacks of chlordane poisoning, she loudly refuses to move, despite the roof and the floors and the ongoing disasters. Now everything’s gone but her small pension and health insurance. The roof is shot, furniture, rare books and carpets ruined by rain long ago. So Bob D— spends his days amidst buckets and pans full of water watching videos and eating expensive Edwards pies:

As you probably know Joe, a Christian company cooks those Edwards pies, and they are – to my taste – decadent. Next to a really good orgasm (the once-in-five-years kind), the Turtle Pie, or Key Lime or Lemon – well, it’s not something that should be discussed in decent company. One of Edwards’ likeable things, in addition to the pies, is what they call “personality pans”. There’s a Bible verse embossed in the aluminum under the pie. Surprise! “God is love” “All good things come to him who waits” “Do unto others . . .” Nothing heavy, just fun wholesome Bible verses. Anyway, one day I was eating my pie, eagerly anticipating the happy moment when the Bible verse would be revealed. As I pushed aside the last lump of gooey lime and lard, there it was, one of those “jaw on the floor moments” (still scraping) . . . “He who will not work, let him not eat!”

STARVE THE MOTHERFUCKER! Implicit in this is everything I despise, the assumption that the poor are worthless scum and “won’t work”, blah. It’s about money, taxes . . . It’s about corporations. And it’s embossed onto the bottom of a $10 pie (as opposed to a $2 pie, if you get my point) The spirit of the moment, after eating a pie with enough calories to restore all the starving children in Calcutta, was another right-wing “FUCK YOU” in the name of the Lord. IT’S THOSE FUCKING POOR PEOPLE, GOD DAMMIT.

As to the videos, Bob has made an intense study of Oliver Stone’s 1990 ABC TV miniseries, Wild Palms, which he deems prophetic. Set in 2006, Wild Palms begins with a nightmare, a rhinoceros in an empty swimming pool, symbolizing “the beast in place of the baptism,” Bob asserts. “The hero runs inside to the screams of his children where, if you look closely, a shadow forms a distinct cross on their bedroom door from which hideous screams emerge. It is about media manipulation, especially through television. Corporations are running wild and their goon squads are beating the uncooperative; torture is discussed and executed by children. There has been a ‘synthetic terrorist attack’ which gave the police ‘broad new powers.’ I think it is damned weird that Wild Palms was so correct right down to the specific year. All cultures have their own prophets that are every bit as important as those in the Bible, but the prophet of course is never recognized in his own time.”

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Agonizing divinity

The first time I experienced a human window into “something other” was in 1972 with hipster holy man Stephen Gaskin. At one point it was very clear that he was experiencing samadhi, the nature of which could be glimpsed. Another time was the birth of my children, that moment when the infant opens its eyes briefly and gives you that unearthly glance of recognition, and the whole room is filled with a funky penetrating electricity that literally smells like the flesh being made holy … as the kid’s eyes give off a flash that says, “Yes we know each other and always will across space and eternity.”

But there is also the terrible anxious look of the sadhu of the burning ghats, the madman, and others connected to that same eternity from which the baby’s consciousness flashed. I have seen far more of this than the blissful kind, which should probably tell me something about the nature of things. Sometimes it is the ecstasy in a Hare Krishna’s eyes, other times it is the look of the universal agony of existence, the sort to which we respond when we behold a legless beggar in Varanasi, India or a homeless schizophrenic in Washington D.C. or Scranton. Agony/divinity. About the worst news I ever got from the pursuit of these things was that enlightenment and truth is all suffering and no bliss, which was always the point. There is no free prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. Just increased consciousness of the world’s suffering. Anyway, when Bob sent me an email, part of which is excerpted below, I suspected I was about to meet another mad adept, or maybe just a madman, either of which prospect always delights me.

Rubber hair transfiguration

As to Etowah being the Rubberized Hair Capital:

When I was young, my home town Etowah was the rubberized hair capital of the world. There was a BIG sign at the city limit informing travelers of that dubious horror/honor. The stuff was bright green. It was hog hair coated with stiff, green rubber. People actually did that for a living—they did that with their lives. Then came the Eighties and the hair plant closed down. All those deaths and maimings on the loading platform of the rubberized hair plant rendered pointless. A few of the dismembered and widowed collected big settlements from the railroad or the plant but, usually, they spent it all frivolously and now live in penury—but with some stories to tell. The richest people in town, the rubberized hair barons, went bankrupt and their family estate is now a Rodeway Inn and McDonalds. Spooky transfigurations took place. The carcasses of abandoned textile mills have been turned into what might loosely be called “outlets,” cavernous holes simply DUMPED full of discarded, outdated, broken merchandise. When I say, “DUMPED”, I mean, “DUMPED”. It is piled up on the floor, sometimes to the ceiling. Much caution is required when walking through lest one be crushed under shifting/falling merchandise. I’m not kidding. Now if you venture far enough back into one of these monstrosities—and down, down, into the belly—you will find amidst the crumbling, raw subterranean concrete and filthy molded block and exposed, termite eaten wood… suddenly a gleaming modern glass facade and, behind it, luxurious big-city-like air-conditioned offices where well-dressed people seem to be doing something useful while sitting on polished chrome and leather furniture with fake Motherwells and Pollocks on the wall. It’s just fucking weird . . .

Deepak Chopra, get a job!

East and West, for the most part religion is synonymous with fraud, with the Pope, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and our president’s phony religious values being the icing on the Christian cultural cake of our times. Bob D— sees the same things in the low-fat spiritual icons of the left and the New Agers:

How has Deepak Chopra managed to express such Republican conservative values with no criticism whatsoever from the left? Chopra is the ultimate example of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, a denizen of Oprah, and a spiritual guru for the superficial, self-serving rich in a miserable, dying world. Listen to him carefully. It’s the Benny Hinn/Robert Tilton/Creflo Dollar “gospel of prosperity”. (If you’re poor, you’re ungodly, and you got what you deserve. God prospers his people.) Chopra states overtly that material success is directly related to spiritual attainment. Oh, really? It would be news to Christ and Buddha.

I will concede the poor are spiritually bankrupt, but no more so than the rich. No more so than the many monasteries and religious communities I have visited. IT’S ALL OF US (on the other hand, the left seems to think the poor are all saints by virtue of their poverty. And I DO think the poor have a more valid excuse for their crimes.) Then Chopra drives in the stake, decrying “throwing money at social problems” and the says, “where you see poverty it is the expression of a deeper impoverishment—the soul, the spirit screaming for nourishment”. Conspicuous by its absence from Chopra’s words is any mention of integrity, ethics, morals, self-sacrifice, commitment, and renunciation. The message, essentially, is, “FUCK YOU! GET A JOB!” Another rhetorical point scored for General Motors and Phillips Petroleum. God comes home to the Wall Street Journal. But this IS America, where everybody is a businessman and Chopra makes his pitch with that sweet, smiling, gentle face reminiscent of Ted Bundy. Chopra’s place is in Beverly Hills telling rich people what they want to hear—for money. And will Chopra read this, sneak in while I’m asleep and beat me to death with $150 ayurvedic bars of soap in one of his Versace silk stockings?

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Trim your beard

“If the scissors are not used daily on the beard, it will not be long before the beard, by its luxuriant growth, is pretending to be the head.”
— Sufi mystic Nur ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jam

Joe, it is all about the center. Getting away from the destructive, divisive periphery (the beard growing out of control, ritual, dogma, concepts, arguments) and right to the universal core germinal point (the face behind the beard, out of which the beard grows) “from within which all religion arises and back to which, ideally, it should lead us.” When I occasionally pass through center while on my way from one periphery to another, IT IS HEAVEN. But today it is warm and raining. The chlordane is reeking. I am having much trouble now, especially opening the mail. Still, those who have been to the center, who have at least perceived, if only for a moment, the face behind the beard, have a responsibility to be critical of those who remain at the periphery with their beards growing out of control.

Meanwhile, the sheer carnage of our terrible national enterprise is staggering! Yet no one mentions the back rooms of research facilities filled with mutilated tortured beings kept alive for study or force-fed Drano to see how long it takes fifty-percent of them to die. I am always astonished at how very few people know what goes on in medical and corporate research labs, not to mention the meat industry. “For every action…” It’s the nature of reality. It’s physics. There will be a reckoning for the culture that creates a holocaust of that magnitude. The fact that there is something terribly wrong with anyone who does such a thing, and that this same “lack” will therefore affect EVERYTHING he/she does, eventually creating magnificently awful problems. Elevating carnage to cultural protocol is very dangerous. And official rationalization of it is disastrous. Why isn’t someone talking about these things? We have no examples. We have no ideals. We have only corruption and self-justifying silliness in service of capitalism as it runs further and more terribly amok.

And to the forces on the left trying to combat all this I say: The realization IS compassion.” “Consciousness” and “heart” arise together. They are one thing. The compassionate try to help even their most despicable brothers. That’s why it is written: “Without love, I am nothing.” Yet the left throws it all away. Though the left is so often correct in principle, it becomes merely the other side of that one counterfeit coin we have been offered. True spirituality is the answer. Therefore, I say to the left, “don’t throw religion away; find out what it’s about”. And intelligent smug people on the left will answer, “There is no God!” Yet that statement is unperceptive, pointless and offensive.

Be compassionate, but be careful. I saw a fighter pilot on the 700 Club who described what sounded like an homoerotic orgasm experienced while shooting down some enemy planes killing the pilots. He interpreted the rush of killing them as “finding God”. God had visited him there in the cockpit. But he and Danuta talked glowingly about it. We have to be careful around these people. Very careful.

Anyhooooo . . . It is raining tonight and right now I am finishing off my liver with orange soda and vodka. The wind is blowing so hard there’ll be no roof left tomorrow. And to that I offer a hearty, “GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE!” Last night I was getting together my mother’s “next-day’s” medicine—her prescriptions and other pills. But I forgot what I was doing, drew a glass of water and took them myself. HA! THERE’S NO HOPE! I have a case of beer and a pizza, so LOOK OUT, MOMMA!

And so this is all very surprising to me — in fact, shocking -— what you are doing. Respecting me like this. I’m a little scared you’ll find out who and what I really am. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. All my words are a humble attempt to point at the moon. Like the Buddha said, “my teaching is a finger pointing to the moon, but all of you are looking at my finger.” Of course, the finger pointing to the moon is analogous to “trimming one’s beard”… the teaching, the teacher, the ritual, the dogma, the practice, language, even the concept of “god” . . .  all of that is also the beard which “grows out” of the face and obscures it. Trim it daily.

Now I ask you this: What do you call the opposite of someone who is out of his mind? A poet? A divine monster? We do not much acknowledge horror in this country, except the petty stage-managed kind for which we have developed such an appetite, such as Terri Schiavo’s morbid gurgling, etc. Yet none of it comes close to the type of horror and grandeur that’s lacking in our life, the kind from which we flee, such as our own graves or the sight of the things we do to sentient others so long as they are poor, voiceless, out of sight, or perhaps have four legs. And even then, the only way we can keep up the ghastly charade is by deeming the saints amid us as madmen, and anointing the truly depraved among us kings, avoiding at all costs our divine monsters.

About Joe Bageant:

Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran.

Joe Bageant

Email Joe Bageant at joebageant@joebageant.com

Beyond the experience of things and places, of watching or participating in rites, of reading or meditating on the scriptures, or of attending lectures, there is the experience of meeting with men in whose hearts the Invisible has revealed himself and through whom his light shines in perfect purity-the mystery of the guru.
The ancient title guru is alas, too often sullied by being used lightly, if not sacriligiously. No one should use this word, let alone dare to call someone his guru, if he does not himself have the heart and soul of a disciple.

In fact it is as unusual to meet a real disciple as it is to meet a real guru. The Hindu tradition is right to say that when the disciple is ready, the guru will automatically appear: only those who are not yet worthy spend their time running after gurus.

The guru and the disciple form a couple, a pair of which the two elements attract one another and adhere to one another. As with the two poles they exist only in relationship to one another . . . A pair on the road to unity . . . A non-dual reciprocity in the final realization. . . .

The guru is most certainly not some master or professor, preacher, or spiritual guide, or director of souls who has learned from books or from other men what he, in his turn, is passing on to others. The guru is one who has himself first attained the Real and who knows from personal experience the way that leads there; he is capable of initiating the disciple and of making well up from within the heart of his disciple, the immediate ineffable experience, which is his own-the utterly transparent knowledge, so limpid and pure, that quite simply ‘he is’.

It is not in fact true that the mystery of the guru is the mystery of the depth of the heart? Is not the experience of being face to face with the guru, that of being face to face with ‘oneself’ in the most secret corner, with all pretence gone?

The meeting with the guru is the essential meeting, the decisive turning point in the life of a man. But it is a meeting that can only take place when one has gone beyond, in the fine point of the soul as the mystics say.

Human encounters do not exclude duality.  In the deepest of them one can say there is a fusion and the two become one in love and desire, but in the meeting of the guru and disciple there is no longer even fusion, for we are on the plane of the original non-duality. Advaita remains for ever incomprehensible to him who has not first lived it existentially in his meeting with the guru.

What the guru says springs from the very heart of the disciple.  It is not that another person is speaking to him. It is not a question of receiving from outside oneself new thoughts which are transmitted through the senses. When the vibrations of the master’s voice reach the disciple’s ear and the master’s eyes look deep into his then from the very depths of his being, from the newly discovered cave of his heart, thoughts well up which reveal him to himself.

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What does it matter what words the guru uses? Their whole power lies in the listener’s response to them. Seeing or listening to the guru the disciple comes face to face with his true self in the depth of his being, an experience every man longs for, even if unconsciously.

When all is said and done, the true guru is he who, without the help of words, can enable the attentive soul to hear the “Thou art that”, Tat-tvam-asi of the Vedic rishis; and this true guru will appear in some outward form or other at the very moment when help is needed to leap over the final barrier. In this sense Arunachala was Ramana’s guru.

The only way of authentic spiritual communication is atmabhasha, the inner communication, the language of the atman spoken in the silence from which sprang the Word and audible in that silence alone.

Suddenly Vanya stopped in the midst of his story and, his heart filled with sadness, continued, ‘Do you now see why the word of Western preachers so seldom penetrates the Hindu soul? Yet the Christ whom they proclaim is the guru par excellence. His voice resounds throughout the world for those who have ears to hear and, more important still, he reveals himself in the secret cave of the heart of man! But when will their words and life witness convincingly to the fact that not only have they heard tell of that supreme guru but have themselves met him in the deepest depths of their souls?’

After a moment he said, ‘Such a meeting in depth is generally called darshana.’

Darshana is, etymologically speaking, vision. It is the coming face to face with the Real in a way that is possible to us in spite of our human frailty. There are philosophical darshana, the systems of the Thinkers which aim at making contact with the Real in the form of ideas. There is also the darshana of the sacred places or kshetra (4), of the Temples, and of holy images or murti, where the divinity who transcends all forms is willing to don the numerous forms invented by man’s imagination when set of fire by faith. Above all there is the darshana of holy men, the most meaningful of all for the man who is on the right wave length. The darshana of the guru is the last step on the path to the ultimate darshana, when the final veil is lifted and all duality transcended.

This is the absolute darshana, the one that India has sought since the beginning of time. Here India shows you her secret and, ‘revealing herself to you, reveals you to yourself in the most intimate depths of your being’.

The rishis of the Upanishads had already sung of the mystery of the guru:

   Without learning it from another how could one
                                                          know that?
          But to hear it from just any man is not sufficient,
          Even should he repeat it a hundred or a thousand
                                                          times . . .
          More subtle than the most subtle is that:
                   out of reach of all discussion . . .
          Neither through reasoning, nor through the idea,
                   nor even through the simple recitation of the
                   Vedas, can one know it . . .
          Worthy of admiration is he who speaks it,
          Worthy of admiration is he who hears it,
          Worthy of admiration is he who knows it having
                                                          been well taught.
                                                         (Katha Upanishad, 2)
          The Brahmin who has investigated the riddle of the
                                                          worlds
          Where Law and Rite hold sway,
                   loses all desire . . .
          Nothing transient can lead to the intransient . . .
          Renouncing the world and full of faith
                   he sets out in search of the master
                   who will reveal to him the secret of Brahman.
          With thoughts controlled and his heart at peace
                   he receives the ultimate wisdom,
                   which reveals to him the True and Imperishable,
                   the Man (purusha) within!
                                                          (Mundaka Upanishad, 1-2)

Narada came and stood before Sanatkumara and said, ‘Master, teach me’.
‘First tell me what you know; then I shall know what to add.’
‘I know the Vedas, the Puranas and all the sciences. I have mastered the mantras, I am mantravid, but I am not atmavid,  I do not know the atman, I do not know myself. Master I have heard tell that those who knew themselves were freed from suffering. I suffer and am restless; help me to pass beyond suffering.’
‘All that you have learned so far is but words.’
And Sanatkumara led Narada to know the secret of the self,
that infinite Fulness which exists only in the self, and is itself present everywhere, on all sides.
          He enabled him to know the other side, that lies beyond the darkness.
                                                (Chandogya Upanishad 7, I & 24ff)

All that I know I have imparted to you,
there is nothing more beyond!
-Thanks be to you, Pippalada, thanks be to you!
You truly are our father.
You have enabled us to reach the other side,
beyond ignorance!

                                      (Prasna Upanishad 6)*
* NOTE: The quotations from the Upanishads found in this book are free ones and are not intended to be literally exact.
1 mantravid (knowledgeable of words, sayings, formulae or science)
2 mantravid: ?vid mfn. knowing sacred t?text G?S´rS. ... the bounds or limits of morality and propriety, rule or custom, distinct law or definition Mn. MBh. ...
3 atmavid’ (the knower of the Self puts an end to the sorrow)
4 Kshetra [kshetra]: temple; in Yoga, field of the body
                  
                  

         
         
 

We call such people saints, mystics, and enlightened ones, knowing that they are of overriding importance for humanity as source of the world’s salvation in accordance with their degree of oneness with what is holy within themselves. Just a few beings who have -— like the Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth — achieved rebirth are sufficient for the upholding across the centuries of hope of man’s redemption from unawareness of what is holy within himself. These beings’ power to point the way towards the truth of human existence cannot be destroyed or annulled by anything. The redeeming power of the saints cannot even be diminished by the distortions of their teachings, disseminated by men who, ignorant of the mystery of such God-filled existence, found religious institutions and lay claim to power over their fellows. The saints remain the light of the world and the way to the very Source of life for all who awaken to recognition of their union with God, comprehending that they provide an example for us, calling upon us across time to follow them in returning to our lives’ spiritual reality so that we too enter upon. a state of wholeness.

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These saints, who have become one with their truth of the Creator Spirit, have been relieved of the transience of time, and that is why their impact extends across the ages. They have discovered eternal life within themselves and draw upon this, and that is why they are bearers of this eternal life, capable of initiating us into it so that we submit to the energies emanating from their living souls. Loving devotion to the great saints, study of their lives, and subjection of oneself to their constant radiance are the precondition for the awakening of such powers in ourselves. ‘Whosoever loves the saints is brought to holiness by them, and whosoever feels attracted by them already has a living soul since access to the souls of saints is only possible by way of the soul. The saint is not comprehensible to someone who is not yet spiritually awakened. He is viewed as being unworldly and as a person who has not found his way in this world.

And yet the saint is the human being whose existence is closest to the reality of life which is, after all, only to be found in the power of God. Full human development can only get under way after incorporation of this power in our lives. If we fail to do that, we remain stuck in our willful, transient, and false existence, unavoidably harming the entire world. It is only when the saints, when whole men, appear that the hope of redemption from our present state of pseudo-humanity shines forth, which is why we must view the saints as the most necessary of human beings with regard to the salvation of our world. It is the unholy man, persisting in his willfulness and stubbornness, whom we should view as unworldly and ill-adapted to his creaturely task, as a being we must vanquish if our world is not to be destroyed by him. Our world needs the saint, it needs human beings who submit to God, since only through them can those powers which lead to implementation of God’s Kingdom in this world be released.

`For this is the will of God, even. your sanctification’. ‘Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God. am holy’. ‘Be ye therefore perfect as your Father which. is in heaven is perfect’. These demands make clear that man’s sole task is to become whole within himself, which means that he must seek union with what is holy within himself, striving above all else to become one with his spiritual reality of the Kingdom of Heaven within himself. Only then can full human development as the Creator intended get under way, since what can complete man’s creation except for God’s power from which man derives?