Off to See the Guru Guy

Laura and I will be driving to Albuquerque this morning to see the guru guy. Last time we tried, we were skunked out. This time we are odor-free and should fit right in. I’m expecting to maybe get a good meditation out of it, and maybe he’ll have something interesting to say. We’ll see.

*

Neil has written a funny and incisive new blog post, “Putting the ‘Fuck’ back in ‘Fuck Yeah!’” It’s inspiring to see the younger generation starting to grab hold like this. I hope they manage to shake things up real good. Check it out: http://neilsolberg.blogspot.com .

*

I’m still puzzling out the Obama Thing. I’ve always been skeptical about him in a political sense, but have always been intrigued by his “Hope and Change” theme. Seeing all the millions of people who are genuinely inspired and excited by Obama, I’m not inclined to sit on the sidelines with my arms crossed like a sour old curmudgeon. I want to ride whatever wave there is. I need to change my schtick. There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But there’s some change in the air. Can you feel it?

The Universe is alive. Once you get to a certain level of discourse, everything becomes metaphor, in an attempt to say the unsayable. We can just grunt and point at the Moon. Thus I say, “The Universe is alive.” To which you might well ask, “What is that supposed to mean?” To which I reply, “Uh, the Universe is alive, know what I mean?”

So, since the Universe is alive, then zeitgeist is more than a concept. We are swimming in zeitgeist at all times. We can’t get away from it. For years now, we’ve been enmeshed within a zeitgeist of paralysis. I could feel it. I had to fight back against it. It was dragging me down. And I looked around me and saw people who weren’t even fighting back. It was as if we were under some kind of spell.

Clearly, Obama is a transformational figure, a spell-breaker, a zeitgeist-shifter. He’s the right person in the right place at the right time, at the cusp of causality, at the still point from which contingencies flow. What he offers -- what he hopes for -- I suspect, is an opportunity for us to ride his coattails. It’s a matter of personal empowerment. If we as individuals become empowered rather than paralyzed, then the zeitgeist will change and the culture will shift. Empowerment implies enthusiasm down to a cellular level – incandescence if you will. There’s never been enough incandescence in America. There have always been too many sphincters that strangle the creative flow.

I look at what has happened to this country – and by extension, the entire planet -- and wonder how we could have allowed this to happen, in an era of such seeming prosperity and creativity. If we are so intelligent -- so we like to think -- how could we have allowed this to happen? Had we no responsibility to anything greater than ourselves? Something very basic, and ultimately very obvious, was left undone. We as a culture are just beginning to wake up from a dream, and are still seeing through a glass darkly. Eventually we will see more clearly. I’m just waking up myself, so all I’m doing right now is stabbing my little penlight into the darkness.

I am thinking about intelligence. There’s a cultural taboo against pointing out that some people are more intelligent than others, and that there are a few people, like Obama, who are far more intelligent than others. It’s the intelligent, the cultural creatives, who are the true “salt of the earth.” (Jesus called his followers the “salt of the earth,” not the “meat and potatoes” of the earth.) It’s the salt that gives the stew its flavor. Yet today, by and large, Christians are the “meat and potatoes,” while the “salt” have moved on to that which doesn’t have a name, which doesn’t need a name – you can’t really call it a religion, you really can’t call it anything, it just is. (“It” is reading this article right now, in a hundred different places.)

Why did the salt abandon the stew? A stew without salt is bland, and salt by itself is way too salty. We have created, essentially, a nation of red state ghettoes. What can be done to change this? Probably the personal empowerment I mentioned earlier would play a significant role. You’ve got to be pretty incandescent to tolerate red state reality.

My energies are shifting into Journey Mode so I’d best wrap this up for today. I’m sure my Grassroots Press article will dispose of all this in a couple of effortless-seeming paragraphs. But for now, I’m just puzzling it all out, which is not necessarily a bad place to be.