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appeared before it as well as a cause of the novel malignancies to come. The
proliferation of quackeries, the flight from secular naturalism into super–
naturalism, the abdication of the ego to the omnipotence of thought, is not,
of course, the only symptom of what is wrong with us, and probably not the
main one either. There are symptoms enough of a strictly secular kind to put
anyone in an apocalyptic mood or to make the hardest of heads look for a
world softened by fantasy to rest itself upon. Some of the smartest people in
the West during this century have done so . T.S . Eliot looked around and saw
writers everywhere hotfoot after strange gods, aut if you ask me, his god is as
strange as any of them, no matter how orthodox. When personal distress and
social stress begin to close in on you from either side, the urge to leap out from
between into the boundless dimensions of cosmic consciousness becomes just
about irresistible. Nevertheless, you do not cure a disease by succumbing to it,
by becoming one of its symptoms .
But that is exactly what William Itwin Thompson, a smart man, has
done, and in an exemplary way-which is why, as it seems to me , he is worth
all these words.
It
takes considerable stress or distress to make a smart man
transform his intelligence from an instrument for testing and exploring what
is not itself into a device for rationalizing an absurdity , even when the
absurdity has the knock-down logic of a consoling delusion . And such symp–
toms of unbearable distress have become epidemic. Flight from the stresses of
existence in the here and now has become a rout. Everyone's gone to the
moon .
It
may be, as Thompson laments, that "Mass American culture is, of
course, not ready for this etheric sexuality," for, that is, "the Tantric tech–
nique of nonorgasmic genital coupling"; but from the depths of my own
apocalyptic mood, mass American culture looks ready for just about anything
else.
It
is ready for everything but the future it is helping to bring about, a
future less likely to be a suburb of Los Angeles than a planetary Bangladesh, a
disaster area whose circumference is nowhere, its center everywhere-and that
includes the inner (and empty) space of cosmic consciousness .
George Stade
