As long time readers are no doubt tediously aware, I spent arguably the best years of my life in a Christian fundamentalist cult and for most of that time I was a True Believer; not only did I zealously adhere to the cult’s tenets myself, I worked tirelessly to convert others to my sorry theology. But for the last couple of years of my time with the brethren I existed in an odd and excruciating limbo. Though I was convinced that my erstwhile belief system was a crock of crap, I remained a nominal member of the church: in short, I had a decision to make. On the one hand, I could retain my family and half a lifetime’s worth of friends by continuing as a putative cult member. True, I would be living a lie, but in retrospect I am convinced that many of my brethren had made exactly this choice.

On the other hand, I could sever my ties with what I now recognized as a vicious cult. This might strike you as an easy decision… but there were complications: since this cult practices a severe form of excommunication, opting out of this false worship meant that I would also be opting out of community. Probably, it also meant the end of my marriage and to be honest with you, I dearly loved the wife of my youth.

But I did pass through it

So I dawdled a year or two, contemplating upon this weighty decision, and here is why I dawdled: disillusioned, as I was, with a particular religious ‘truth’, I wondered if it was such a great idea to risk, really, my entire life on a concept as nebulous as absolute truth. I thought there might, in fact, be an upside to hypocrisy. It seems a little presumptuous to say that I passed through what St. John of the Cross called the “Dark Night of the Soul”; let us say, instead, that I passed through a ‘Cloudy Afternoon of the Soul’. But I did pass through it. In the event, and as you have probably figured out, I did renounce my vows to the idiotic religion I had become ensnared in and I chose Truth. And, in fact, things turned out much as I expected. My so-called friends dumped me like a carton of sour milk, my marriage ended, and my children were coached to look at me with fear. For several months, life sucked. And then… things got better. New friends, new opportunities, a surge of creativity, and above all, a sense of joy and freedom that remains with me even now. In a very meaningful sense, I was born again.

So now I suppose I am that tiresome creature, a person with advice. For I am certain that a percentage of you, my readers—like a percentage of all humans—are living a lie. You’re in a loveless relationship, a toxic religion, a thankless job, or are existing in some other form of hypocrisy. And I am here to tell you… choose truth. And especially… choose your truth. I won’t promise you that your path will be easy or pleasant, for I know from bitter experience that it may, in fact, be painful. You could even die. But the fact is, when you live a lie, you are already as good as dead… and you may as well start acting like it.

Everything we see and even the thoughts that form in our brain are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles… well they’re made of nothing; what I’m trying to say is that everything comes from nothing and, therefore, everything is a miracle. To single out some things as being somehow more miraculous than other things is a mistake. A mistake I’m going to make now by telling you stories of three miraculous events: a visualization fulfilled, an answered prayer, and a direct, non-verbal communication from the Christian god, together with prologues and kickers, and an optional application to your very own life.

A Visualization Fulfilled:
Prologue: Finding myself jobless in Idaho, I talk myself into a position with a one-man software firm. I have a facility for the work, and prosper modestly, but there’s one problem: the owner, Gary, has always worked from his crowded basement office and sees no reason why I can’t do the same. Seeing no other recourse, and having just read a book on the subject, I decide to bring the perfect office into my life via visualization, which is a strange decision for me as the Christian fundamentalist cult to which I then adhered rather frowns on visualization, affirmation, meditation, positive thinking and… well, they frown on a lot of things.

The Event: I form a mental picture of the office I desire. It is to have four components: high ceilings, elaborate millwork, a downtown location, and some interesting architectural detail. Several times a day I hold a vision of this ideal office. That’s all I do. I take no other steps, I simply… think about what I want. Within three weeks, our little firm is located in a downtown Pocatello office. The ceilings are 12 feet high and the millwork is nearly a foot wide. Oh, and the unspecified architectural detail? Turns out this office comes complete with its own jail cell.

they frown on a lot of things

The Kicker: Shortly after moving into this office, Gary appears to lose his mind. He begins by diverting company funds amounting to $30,000 into the construction of a backyard shed, a shed built to resemble a Japanese teahouse, on a rock foundation, constructed of high grade redwood, and roofed with… copper shingles. He next manages to fall prey to a recently released scam artist, who talks Gary into supplying him with a desktop computer, two laptop computers, and some cash for ‘investment’, all while taking meetings in a Motel 6…

Shortly thereafter I quit in disgust.

An Answered Prayer:
Prologue: While taking a bath in Idaho, I receive a phone call from my mother in Kentucky who tells me that my father has just had a stroke. My family and I leave the next morning and arrive two days later. My father’s right side is paralyzed and he is unable to speak. Since my mother has just undergone double bypass surgery, the situation is serious and we decide to move to Kentucky to help them out. I have one day to secure a job before returning to Idaho to pack. Since I am still a member of the aforesaid wacko Christian cult, and since visualization didn’t seem to work out so well, I offer up a fervent prayer to God, asking for His divine assistance.

I have been working as a land surveyor, so I take the yellow pages and a map and head to Owensboro, determined to apply in person to every survey company listed. I begin by driving to a firm named McDonough-Brown. I know that I am in the right block and have the correct address, but for the life of me I cannot find it. I walk up and down the block a few times and ask the locals for assistance, but ultimately I leave in frustration.

I manage to speak to every other firm on my list, and none have any openings. It is a long, frustrating day and, frankly, I am a little disappointed with God’s effort.

The Event: I impulsively try one more time to find the mysterious McDonough-Brown. This time, when I pull up to the address, I immediately see a fairly prominent sign that says, “McDonough-Brown”. I walk in. I launch into my spiel, which by now is well-practiced. Everyone seems surprised, no, shocked to see me, and they fall all over themselves to show me the place, explain what they do, and persuade me to work for them. It was weird… but I leave with a job.

I later learn why everyone was so astonished to see me. Turns out, moments before I arrived, the owners were abruptly forced to fire a long time employee for failing a drug test. If I’d looked over my shoulder while walking in, I would have seen him driving away. Had I arrived earlier in the day, there would have been no opening. My arrival at that precise moment struck all of McDonough-Brown’s employees as an act of… God.

The Kicker: This is easily the worst job I have ever had. I am away from home for weeks at a time, working in swamps, nominally in charge of a crew of pistol-packing politically paranoid rednecks named Wayne. The work is brutal and degrading, and sometimes involves lugging sacks of cement hundreds of yards from a truck to a boat, a procedure that systematically lines all of my orifices with a thin layer of concrete. Though still a Christian, I can’t help but wonder if there might be something to reincarnation and if I was, perhaps, a really nasty person in a previous life.

A Direct Non-Verbal Communication from the Christian God:
Prologue: In the beginning of the summer of 1984, my life is, frankly, perfect. I am on my university’s honor roll, I have been training for a triathlon and am an Adonis, I am sharing a beach house with friends, and I am beginning to realize that girls, though puzzles, are solvable puzzles. Even my hair is looking good. Clearly, this is going to be the best summer ever and I kick it off with a trip to a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento.

At that concert I have a bad acid trip, the most harrowing experience of my life. To tell the story of that bad trip properly would be a separate lecture, but for your entertainment I am going to attempt the impossible and condense it into one sentence.

{breath}

Arriving early at the concert I begin to take any and all drugs that are offered to me and wind up gobbling acid, shrooms and unidentified pills by the handful which gradually engender in me a paranoid conviction that the concert is in fact a ploy to attract and slaughter would be hippies like myself and so I escape from the stadium by jumping a fence and running across an eight lane freeway only to find myself in a field full of thorns, stickers and burrs, convincing me definitely that this is no ordinary would be hippie slaughtering conspiracy but that I am in fact in hell, and if I’m in hell, of course, I might as well take off all my clothes and surrender to the demons, which I do, but the demons don’t show up so I run back and forth across the freeway, naked, looking for them and then I run into an apartment complex, still naked, to make a phone call, and the police show up and I’m actually pretty happy to see them, so I surrender and am handcuffed and placed in a squad car only to realize, too late, that the police are in league with the demons and now I want to escape so I kick out the police car door window with my bare feet and, yes, still naked, wriggle out and almost make it until four of them land on me like, well, a ton of cops and I am placed in four point restraint and taken to a hospital where I suddenly realize that I’m not in hell but, rather, am in the midst of a millennium-long, life and death struggle between good and evil and it’s absolutely imperative that I take sides in this struggle and after thinking it over for a while, I choose… good.

{breath}

The Event: Two days later I am sitting in my living room, trying to figure out just how one signs up on the side of good. I hear a knock on the door. And then something happens that I can’t explain; sitting there in my living room I suddenly feel as if a non-verbal stream of information is being beamed directly into me, as if God himself has decided to reach out to me, and the message I am given is the absolute certainty that whoever is knocking is bringing the Truth. It is a profound, soul-shattering, supernatural event. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just been born again.

So whatever the folks at the door are selling, I’m buying, and when I open the door I am not particularly surprised to see a pair of… Christian cultists. The next evening, I attend my first meeting and am a faithful, true believing cult member for the next 18 years.

The Kicker: Being in a cult really sucks. I quit school and never do get a degree. For 18 years I attend five meetings a week and go door-to-door as many as 100 hours a month. I read four church magazines, a book or two, and a couple of pamphlets each month. I see no R rated movies, smoke no tobacco, give and receive no oral sex, celebrate no holidays, take no blood transfusions though I need them, offer no toasts, salute no flag and am generally an insufferably self righteous son of a bitch. I drop my non-cult friends, refuse to attend my own brother’s wedding, and take Prozac to suppress obsessive suicidal ideation. When I finally leave the cult, more than a hundred close friends immediately stop talking to me for fear of offending God and I leave behind an ex-wife and two children one of whom, frankly, fears me to this day because she believes that a heretic like myself is a sinner worse than a murderer, rapist or child molester.

What I am trying to say is that the holy sense of rightness that I felt, the conviction that God himself was leading me to Truth… led directly to the most… fucked up mistake I’ve ever made.

An Optional Application to Your Own Life:
So what am I saying? That visualization is useless, that answered prayers come with dark strings attached, that divine revelations are from trickster gods who seek to mislead us? No, not at all. My point is more subtle than that.

I have a truth to share with you, and it’s an optional truth because it’s mine, not yours or, at least, not necessarily yours. But my truth is this: you are your own gods. You are miracles creating miracles, you are the weavers of reality. And that’s a heavy burden and it’s tempting to lay that burden down and turn it over to some God or prophet, but here’s the thing: you can never lay it down. Never. Never, never, never; never.

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Is this a problem? Is it possible that the handing down of belief from one generation to the next leads to confusion, like a massive, centuries long game of telephone? Is it possible that as a religion gets older, it gets farther away from its roots? Does the survival of the organization become more important than the spiritual needs of its followers?

Should every generation make up their own religion?

I was thinking about these questions and a little story, a parable, occurred to me and I wrote it down as fast as I could. Frankly, it didn’t feel like something I’d written, it felt like a gift… and here it is.

Once upon a time there was a village in the hills, suffering from drought. The villagers searched for water and found, miraculously it seemed, a fresh pure spring high in the hills and far away. They were so happy. Though it was a difficult journey, they went to the spring often, to drink at the source and to haul back what they needed for day to day use.

But eventually they began to notice that it was quite a long round trip and that it was difficult to bring back all that they needed. So they conceived of a pipeline, the greatest task they could ever set for themselves, and with great effort and after many false starts they were able to build it and it made them happy. Now they could have water from the spring right in their village.

a funny taste now and then

Now the villagers were the first to admit that their pipeline was not perfect. Having no other material at hand, they were forced to use rather thin bamboo that limited the flow and the tar they used to seal the joints could give the water a funny taste now and then. So, although they were happy with their pipeline, some of the villagers would journey up to the spring on occasion, to drink pure water from the source.

Time passed, and eventually all those who had discovered the spring and built the pipeline passed on. Their children had been told about the spring, and they believed in it. After all, they could see the proof of its existence in the steady supply of water that was delivered to their village. Few of them had actually been to the source, but they appreciated the water (not knowing it could taste better) and the pipeline, and they were content.

Still more time passed and the flow of water began to wane and it even stopped at times. The villagers assumed that the spring was dying away – but they could never have thought this if they had seen the beautiful spring for themselves. In reality, the pipeline was failing because it was old and because it was being neglected.

The villagers began to grumble and to doubt everything they had ever been told. Needing water, some moved to other villages. Most of those who remained tried to live off of the water that still came through the pipeline, though it was scarce now, and foul tasting. A few, a very few, went searching and exploring, and followed the old pipeline far back into the hills and discovered the spring for themselves, as full and as fresh and as pure as it had ever been.

And they were very happy.

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The making of vows seems hardly human

Though I can’t remember the details of the oaths I took as a Cub Scout, Webelo and Boy Scout, I believe I am safe in saying that I have violated both the letter and spirit of all of them. The same can be said for all the godly commitments I made at the various levels of the YMCA sponsored Christian brownshirt program to which I adhered for several years. I actually can remember the vows I publicly professed when being inducted into the cult in which I misspent my youth, but I am too embarrassed to repeat them here – suffice it to say that I have broken them repeatedly, and with gusto. Finally, the earnest vows I made to my first wife in a ritualistic church ceremony were broken just a few years ago and I have to admit, that one hurt and was also expensive, much like necessary surgery. But still, I did it, and I must acknowledge that I am by now a practiced oath breaker, a promise non-keeper, and a passionate disregarder of all my youthful commitments… hurray for me. The pleasures of idolatry, fornication, drunkenness, heresy, the occult and several other categories of taboo are magnificent and easily outstrip the pallid rewards of faithful asceticism. My mental and spiritual well-being are also improved, which only makes sense – it is always a good idea to escape confinement, in whatever form it occurs.

I now maintain that breaking vows is not nearly so sinful as making them in the first place; after all, when you think about it, a man who makes a vow is a man who has decided not to change, not to adapt his beliefs to new knowledge or circumstances. He is a man who has decided not to think and, at least in my book, is a grievous sinner indeed.

The making of vows seems hardly human, and it’s interesting to note that the nefarious practice most often occurs in political and religious settings. Governments and churches are very eager to bind us with our own words, to tie us up with guilt and fear. It’s easy to see what these corporate entities get out of the arrangement – armies of self-policing followers. But how, exactly, do humans benefit? Can it ever be a good idea to agree in advance not to change my mind? Doesn’t it seem a little paradoxical to use our human capacity for reason and commitment to commit to not reasoning?

The whole thing stinks to me; if what I am agreeing to is such a good idea, why can’t everyone involved trust that it will continue to be a good idea? Why must my very soul be subjected to an eternal, non-negotiable contract? I wouldn’t sign such a contract with a used car dealership or a time-share condo association and nothing in my personal experience – or world history – suggests that religions or governments are any more reliable.

Perhaps I need to make just one more vow, one that settles the matter once and for all. I swear to God, I am never going to swear to God again or, for that matter, to any other entity.

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Some of the most fascinating and persistent occult phenomena to afflict our planet are the continuing apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who first began to appear to the faithful in 352 A.D. and whose appearances continue in modern times.

It is tempting for non-Catholics to assume that the Church has a vested interest in certifying Marian apparitions, to impress believers and non-believers alike. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, and the elaborate bureaucracy and methodology for evaluating miracles conforms rather admirably to scientific method. The great majority of Marian apparitions – well over 95% – are flatly rejected because they don’t meet the miracle investigators’ high standards of proof. The miracles that remain, the intransigent few, are grudgingly dubbed ‘worthy of belief’.

One of the approved apparitions, and my personal favorite, is Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who appeared in 1531 to the peasant Juan Diego of Guadeloupe, Mexico. The Lady asked Juan to be her messenger to the local Bishop and, charmingly, provided not one but two miracles of manifestation to aid poor Juan in his task. One of these, a bouquet of flowers produced in winter, is long gone but the other survives to our day and continues to awe the credulous and puzzle skeptics. It is an image of the Lady herself, printed or painted on Juan’s tilma, an apron-like garment made of agave fiber. Though the tilma’s fabric is quite coarse, the image on it is photographically crisp, with no visible brush marks. No one has ever explained how such precise work could have been done in 1531.

So the image is one of these confounding things

But even more astonishing is the tilma’s very survival. Ordinarily, agave fabric disintegrates in 20 years or so, but for almost 500 years the Guadeloupe relic has survived exposure to candle smoke, incense, and handling by many thousands of believers. Even the colors of the image remain surprisingly bright and clear which is, simply put, impossible. The frail fabric even survived, unscathed, a 1921 bombing that shattered the surrounding building.

So the image is one of these confounding things, a persistent, incarnate mystery, like the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film or the Voynich manuscript; they don’t seem to really belong to our world and yet, unquestionably, they are in it.

When formulating an opinion about odd objects like the Guadeloupe image, it seems to me that there are two ways to go wrong. One is to reflexively deny the miraculous aspects of the object; the other is to accept it at face value.
Reflexive skepticism is a mistake because it pointlessly shrinks our world. It takes the mystery out of something that is, in fact, mysterious and, over time, diminishes our ability to accept the miraculous aspects of day to day existence.

Simple acceptance goes wrong by pretending to more certainty than is actually possible; after all, the defining feature of the Guadeloupe image is its inexplicability – and if we can’t explain the object, it is mere hubris to say we understand its maker.

We have to find a middle ground between these two responses – to acknowledge the miraculous intrusions into our world, while not blindly accepting the intruders story at face value.

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When asked about my faith I am wont to reply, cheerfully, that I’m a godless heathen but that felt like rather an unsatisfactory thing to be, a few years ago, while listening to a breathtakingly fine local production of Handel’s Messiah. The music washed over me like waves of pure spirit, alternately exalting and humbling, leaving me breathless, expanded, teary-eyed… the whole bit. For minutes at a time I even felt religious, which never happens, and at one moment in particular I was quite ready to fall to my knees and offer praise to the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Thankfully the feeling passed and I reverted to my usual state of introverted cynicism, wondering what had just happened. Clearly the power and majesty of this particular piece of music depends entirely on its devotion to a particular religious view—it would be ridiculous to assume that a work of equivalent power could be dedicated to, say, the taste of a ripe tomato in mid-Summer, still warm from the garden, though that, too, is divine. And yet, the religious ideas being expressed are also ridiculous—even at the height of my musical swoon I would not have agreed that the creator of all-that-is makes special provisions in the afterlife for those lucky enough to have decoded his preferred form of devotion. And my pompous ruminations on faith and religion are probably the most ridiculous thing of all—who am I to take the measure of another’s faith?

It seems to me that faith itself is holy

The one thing that wasn’t ridiculous was the performance itself; in fact, it was sublime. And isn’t that always the way? We silly humans, we careless naked primates, working with the rough asymmetries we have at hand are, fairly often, able to call forth beauty that approaches perfection: how?

Could it be faith? I attended the Messiah at the invitation of a friend, and it was during her solo that I was most vulnerable to the Lord. The purity of her devotion, the expression of faith without one particle of hypocrisy, was a moment of such intense beauty that I am happy to call it divine; indeed, I don’t know what else to call it. And not incidentally, her inexplicable faith in my miserable self was the only reason I was there at all.

It seems to me that faith itself is holy, and not necessarily the objects of faith. If beauty is to manifest at all, ever, it must necessarily make use of the imperfect materials offered: to call forth that beauty requires faith, which is to say, it requires a disregard for imperfection, an ability to see the divine even in this sad world: glory be to God for dappled things.

If faith is a blindness to flaws, and if faith is required to call forth beauty, then perhaps I am a man of faith after all. For I too see the Lord lurking everywhere, cloaked in the tawdry imperfections of religion and culture. And when He chooses to drop the disguise, to flash forth beautifully and radiantly, I am as moved as any man, and as happy to be in His presence. And, when the occasion calls for it, I am very happy to sing, “Hallelujah!”

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Remember, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Even on the increasingly rare occasions that Timothy Leary’s LSD-popularizing antics are really discussed, the man known then as Richard Alpert appears as little more than a sidekick—Robin, to Leary’s Dark Knight—and his book, Be Here Now, a mere punch line to a forgotten 60s joke. But in the decades since, with Leary’s needle stuck at ‘groovy’ right up until his relatively early death, Alpert’s fully disclosed spiritual struggles, his open record of extreme growth and change, and of course his transformation into America’s own guru, Ram Dass, have left him, perhaps, the greater figure. By any reckoning, he is a scarred and worthy chronicler of a numinous time, and an interesting living experiment that still unfolds.

I had the good fortune to be handed Be Here Now in the midst of one of my very first acid trips, when I was still convinced that there was meaning beneath all the fireworks. I puzzled over it quite happily for hours, imprinted on it, and it has affected my subsequent spiritual life as surely as childhood religious instruction; and like childhood religious instruction, the influence has not always been positive and shaped me by my resistance at least as much as by my acquiescence. For example I, for far too many years, accorded Hindu-flavored spirituality far more respect than I now feel it deserves.

It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets

Be Here Now is actually three books in one. The introduction is Alpert’s tale of the years with Leary, his travels in India, and the encounters with the fabulous guru, Neem Karoli Baba, that remade Alpert as Ram Dass. It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets. The middle, longest, section is a hand lettered and illuminated attempt to convey, experientially, certain verities of the psychedelic experience. It is strange, strangely powerful, and I am not able to capture it in a net of mere words—take strong hallucinogens (or, if you prefer, entheogens) and read it for yourself. And finally, the book concludes with an adequate primer of the aforementioned Hindu-flavored spirituality—meditation, yoga, veganism, etc.—the efficacy of which is demonstrated by the easy competence with which India governs herself and cares for her people. Am I too cynical? Very well, paw through this section yourself and carry away the bits you find shiny… that’s certainly what I did, and I can’t say I regret it.

Separately, none of these parts is indispensable, but like the disparate, ridiculous books of the Bible (have you ever read the Book of Jonah?) when gathered together (along with an excellent bibliography) they amount to scripture. And, like scripture, they can remake your world to the extent you let them.

Alpert/Dass is, it must be said, a substantial spiritual fuck up, but I will always love him for this book, and for the way he once compared the way he figuratively fell on his face over and over to a man making his way to a holy city by means of continual prostrations—it was too apt a description of my own life to ever forget.

Promethea, by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a literary titan whose medium happens to be comic books: deal with it. The fact is, Moore is positively Joycean in the way he packs layers of meaning into words and, unlike Joyce—or Pynchon, or Wallace—he has the whole playground of image to play with as well.

The substantial success Moore attained with his scripts for Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and other titles—and the substantial disappointments he suffered as those graphic masterpieces were translated to the screen—both allowed him and drove him to focus on more insular, idiosyncratic work… one can almost hear him muttering, ‘make a movie of this you effing bastards,’ as he completed his pornographic masterwork Lost Girls, or the swirl of Cabala, sex magick, metaphysics, and superhero mythology comprising the work I extol here, Promethea.

Available in five volumes that collect the original comics, the spine of Promethea is conventional for the costumed vigilante genre: a young lady, Sophia Bangs (pay attention to those names, reader) finds herself blessed/cursed with the ability to transform herself into the curvaceous superheroine Promethea, who is able to fly, shoot beams of force from her caduceus, and so forth. In coming to terms with her new powers, she meets and beats assorted villains, and ushers in the end of the world.

Wait; what was that last part? End of the world? It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you so—from early on in Book One it’s clear that Promethea’s world faces the end of history.

But not by nuclear annihilation, as in Watchmen, but by Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, or some other name drawn from the end time theologies so often found in human spiritual systems. In her quest to understand her role as Destroyer, Sophie/Promethea thoroughly explores the Western esoteric tradition.

In his personal life, Moore is an accomplished ceremonial magickian and here, like Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, he uses an exciting, bawdy, page-turning tale to sugarcoat serious philosophical instruction. The attentive reader will come away from Promethea with a useful grounding in tarot, cabala and the tree of life, Crowleyan ritual, and will even get an intriguing and accurate glimpse of Goetic demonology.

More importantly, by reading this book and letting it’s glorious graphics seduce you, you will imbibe a certain mindset and realize at gut level that what we are pleased to call reality is merely an insubstantial scrim imperfectly concealing the actual nature of existence. And as Sophie—and her entire world—are forced to acknowledge, confronting an unveiled all-that-is is both terrifying… and thrilling.

Travels, by Michael Crichton

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the fact is, I like Michael Crichton’s novels and have read most of them. And of course, I’m not alone in that—Crichton’s books have sold 150 million copies worldwide. But relatively few have read Travels, which makes sense because it’s pretty much the opposite of a ‘Crichton book’. It’s short not long, it’s a memoir not thriller fiction, and it’s written in a graceful, unaffected voice, not the thudding, heart-pounding! thriller prose that Crichton mastered long before writers like Dan Brown or David Baldacci began to hammer readers over the head with it. I think he missed his audience with this one; Travels is not for the average thriller reader.

As you might guess from the title, Crichton is here writing a travel memoir but, crucially, he includes inner journeys as well. Beginning with his experiences as a 6’9” medical student who put himself through medical school writing potboilers—and the The Andromeda Strain—and continuing with multiple world trips, and his experiences meditating, directing movies, learning to see auras, tripping intensely, bending spoons, diving with sharks, etc. etc. His clear exposition of the events experienced and of his own mental state while they unfolded is what makes Travels remarkable. Also, his motivation for writing Travels is unimpeachable; he certainly didn’t need the money, and must have known that this book wouldn’t make him much anyway. Nor would it exactly burnish his reputation… the questing, skeptical-but-believing Michael Crichton on display in Travels is not the Michael Crichton he would want Hollywood agents to negotiate with.

So ultimately, Travels is immensely credible. Crichton tells me that he learned to bend spoons one evening, and I believe him. He tells me that a weekend workshop gave him the gift of seeing auras, and I start looking for such a workshop to attend myself…

And thus is reality undermined.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Just to get it out of the way, yes, these are Young Adult novels. And they’re based on Milton’s Paradise Lost… or so I’m told. But so what?—we must take wisdom where we find it, and in the three books of His Dark Materials—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman is not only wise, but brave, taking on, as he does, conventional religious thinking in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Most reviews of His Dark Materials focus on daemons, the animal-guised, familiar-like soul analogues that Pullman brilliantly fishes up from exceedingly deep archetypal waters and, yes, daemons are cool but for my money even more attention should be paid to his frankly anti-church agenda; read at the cusp of adolescence, these books will effectively immunize against excessive religiosity. I read them when I was struggling with my own religious addictions—I’m a recovering fundamentalist—and they were the kick in the ass I needed to actually change.

None of this would matter if Pullman was preachy or didactic, but fortunately—and unlike myself—he is neither. Instead, he couches his serious life lessons in a compulsively readable coming-of-age tale, set against a backdrop of witches, armored bears, dirigibles, and passages between worlds. As you are pulled from page to page, you will also be reordering your views on spiritual expression… so read with care.

My Life With the Spirits, by Lon Milo Duquette

Though I have cast spells, performed sex magick rituals, and worshipped my patron goddess Ostara under a full moon at Summer Solstice, the fact is I am a dilettante, not a practicing magickian. But even an armchair magickian must read astonishing quantities of written material, for surely it is the wordiest of hobbies, with tome after tome devoted to the arcana of divination, cabala, Crowleyan ritual, chaos magick, Enochian scrying, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in all this vast, mostly fascinating, swamp of literature there is one writer, Lon Milo Duquette, who stands apart because he sees himself with without illusion, and because he writes with exceptional clarity, self-deprecation, and humor.

His Chicken Qabalah is a useful and lucid explication of how and why a non-Jew might explore Cabala for spiritual purposes, Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a perfectly acceptable primer for those interested in Western ceremonial magick, and should you decide to flirt with high strangeness and engage the Beast directly, you can have no better Virgil than Duquette in his books, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, and Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation.

But before you read any of these (and even if you have no intention to read these, or any, books on magick) read My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Like three other books on this list, it is a memoir of alternative spirituality. Conventionally autobiographical, My Life With The Spirits follows Duquette from early childhood through delightfully rock-and-roll-and-magick infused hippie years, and into an adulthood as a sober and respected bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Like all my favorite people, Duquette has a zest for direct experience and he exuberantly dives into yoga, communal life, magickal ritual, and whatever else captures his interest. And he writes up his experiences with the brio and humility that I associate with truth telling. His tales of Goetic evocation, for example, are masterpieces of immersion journalism: accurate, frightening, and funny.

Duquette’s writings undermine my grasp on conventional reality because they have the ring of truth. Based on my own (relatively trivial) magickal experimentation and his clear reporting, I am forced to accept that demons (and angels) are real and can act on our plane, that Enochian calls effectively summon visions of another world, and that a dead kitten can, under the influence of the right prana master, be restored to life.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Duquette’s oeuvre is his attitude of, if you will, ‘dogmatic agnosticism’. He doesn’t insist that you believe him, doesn’t attempt to convert, and freely concedes that everything unusual that he experiences may well be ‘all in his head’. “But,” he continues (a little dogmatically), “you have no idea how big your head is!”

Living With Joy, by Sanaya Roman

I didn’t set out to become a fan of channeled material, and I can’t tell you how I came across Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, but in the six or so years that have passed since I abandoned fundamentalist Christianity no genre of literature has affected me more profoundly. Seth, I confess, is too intellectual for me, but Abraham and sometimes Kryon move me profoundly. And though he has a relatively small following—bad PR?—the entity who styles himself Oren, channeled by Sanaya Roman, has gradually and completely upended my world view, and Living with Joy is my bedside scripture.

There may be more to this world view than I am able to express, or I may be distorting it—I’ve been forced to admit in recent years that I am able to grasp only a small fraction of the data presented to me—but here is some of what I have gleaned:

• The all-that-is actively engages with individuals, reshaping itself to conform to an individual’s basic beliefs and expectations about reality. The all-that-is is like a nervous new lover, eager to conform to the beloved’s illusions.

• Our basic beliefs and expectations about reality are entirely within our control. Which is to say, the suite of beliefs we use to order and understand the all-that-is are choices, not understandings or deductions or inevitabilities. Likewise, we are free to expect whatever we like. Note: this is not to say that we control the all-that-is. It is more as if the all-that-is is an agreeable maestro, presenting itself in a way that is consonant with the observer’s disposition. But even so, certain verities persist, which is why day-to-day reality does not shift instantly to accommodate our fancies, as in a lucid dream.

• This being the case, it makes sense to deliberately choose our beliefs and shape our expectations so that we gradually create the most enjoyable life possible. We can also, incidentally, change our pasts by deliberately reinterpreting our memories.

• There are myriad techniques that accomplish this restructuring: prayer, spells, visualizations, drugs, ritual, are just a few effective examples. Different entities tend to focus on different techniques.

• You can start now.

By dipping into Living with Joy regularly, my thinking has gradually taken on this world view. I now pay attention to the tenor of my thoughts, state my goals in positive language, assume responsibility for my circumstances, etc., etc. And consequently, reality is now different for me. Delightful synchronicities abound, I live in freedom, experience joy, and no longer feel that I am a victim in a hostile environment. My fundamental belief about the way the world works is that the all-that-is is a wish granting machine, and that it dances with me every day.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson

I didn’t realize until compiling this list that I have read a lot of spiritual memoirs, and have been largely remade in their image. None have affected me more profoundly than Robert Anton Wilson’s (PBUH) Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati, the essential first volume of his three volume autobiography.

For me it has always been books, not teachers, that appeared when I was ready, and Cosmic Trigger showed up when I first decided in my heart—where it mattered—that I could no longer abide the fundamentalist Christian cult I had faithfully espoused for the first 17 years of my adult life. I knew others who had left what I was then pleased to call, “The Truth.” Some were always sad or bitter, some fairly groveled in their efforts to reinstate themselves, some gave themselves over to unattractive dissipation, and at least one—a smart fellow, like me—was dead of suicide. I didn’t know of any, at the time, who had made a success of their heresy and infidelity, none who had attained the happy, creative heathenism that I so craved.

Cosmic Trigger broke me open like a thunderbolt, like the divine bolt of lightning that is seen in the tarot’s Tower card, redefining an individual existence. It was Wilson’s contention that we all live in “reality tunnels,” self-manufactured existences made up of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about the way things ‘really’ are. Had he said only this, it would have been enough, for just the phrase and his explication gave me a way to understand and work with the morbid eschatology I had lived within for so long.

But Wilson went further, describing his experiments with “rapid brain change.” In his efforts to overcome a “normal” Catholic upbringing (and parenthetically, I have always found it fascinating that so many interesting writers have Catholic school in their past—might the need to assert themselves early against an ancient propaganda set them on the road to literature?) Wilson deliberately made use of the brutal shocks to consciousness available via psychedelic drugs, taboo violation, ceremonial (especially Crowleyan) magick, the books of James Joyce, Sufi exercises, and the like. And by writing constantly and surrounding himself with a good wife and good friends, he managed to integrate the inrush of change that resulted and ended up—at least by his own estimation—a happier and saner man.

I copied him. I ingested LSD and psilocybin and salvia divinorum and lots of pot, I donned ceremonial garb and performed pagan rites, and I attended Sufi dances. And I found my own way, as well; since the cult to which I had formerly been faithful especially reviled tobacco and tarot, I bought myself some fine cigars and learned to smoke them while laying out a Celtic cross, and since I had so repetitiously heard that the Boss of all-that-is hates extramarital sex I made sure to have some ASAP. And I’ve done other things, too, meditations and visualizations, group sex and odd sex, sought out strange places and strange companions, and through it all I wrote constantly and surrounded myself with good friends… the wives came and went. And of course I had the guidance of Wilson himself, via his many books, and I have to say that at the end of it all I am—by my own estimation—a happier and saner man.

Cosmic Trigger is, of course, more than an extreme self help program. Wilson’s thoughts on personas, for example, are revelatory and his insights into the writer’s life remain a guide for me. Most of all, he tells his tales of an interesting life and philosophy in the whiskey-warmed, unpretentious voice of an ideal barstool companion.

Buy it, read it, live it. You have nothing to lose but all your illusions.

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The promiscuous mingling of church and state left me slightly nauseated

On a recent visit to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, I happened across the Washington Memorial Chapel, which looks very like a small cathedral, except that larded in with the pulpit, pews, baptismal font and other trappings of ritualized Yahweh worship one also finds heroic statues, state seals, bad poetry and other elaborate encrustations more often associated with city halls, capitol buildings, and other excretions of Governmentlandia. The promiscuous mingling of church and state left me slightly nauseated and even a little shocked, for usually the two principalities have the decency to partially veil their incestuous intercourse. Not that they ever really take a break: the intertwining of spiritual and temporal urges dates at least to the days that popes crowned kings and though there have been spats down through the centuries the relationship is still passionate. And like any relationship that stands the test of time, the attraction is not merely physical—there are numerous practical benefits. Churches benefit when the state mandates, or at least encourages, religious observance and prohibits the use of psychedelics and other alternative spirituality. And governments are always happy to have their subjects sedated by the opiate of the masses and made ready for war or servitude, as the need arises. In business terms—and what other terms could possible apply?—the synergies maximize profit.

But whether we puny humans, struggling to achieve a bit of happiness in this vale of sorrow, also benefit is certainly debatable. It’s difficult, after all, to see institutionalized religion as anything but an expensive inconvenience and the best thing one can say for most governments is that they do a good job tidying up our corpses after we die in the wars they inflict on us. So reducing the reach and influence of these predators is greatly to be desired, and prohibiting their immoral congress is a good place to start.

Because I have a large brain, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, ‘Hey, here in the United States we do separate church and state’ but the separation I have in mind would be considerably more separate. Public officials would not be sworn in on the Bible or any other holy book, they would not be allowed to publicly express religious beliefs—ideally they’d be atheists, or at least agnostic—there’d be no such job as senate chaplain, and in every other way conceivable the two lovers would be thoroughly segregated, or at least adequately chaperoned.

I find it curious that believers are so eager to get in bed with politicians, and a little hypocritical as well. After all, if there is anything at all to this God they keep nattering on about, He is presumably able to take care of Himself, and even promote His preferred agenda, without the aid of government programs, pogroms, or other manifestations of politicized religiosity. And certainly His followers are able to cause more than enough trouble without the benefit of State support.

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It occurred to me, recently, that all religion is at least mildly insulting to the divine. For think about it: religions, of all flavors, always assume that humans are somehow wanting, are incomplete or imperfect or unhappy, are somehow in need of help from a pastor or guru, or faith or doctrine or special diet, or something. And so religions put themselves in the position of perfecting God’s creation… and that, I assert, is a little insulting: for why would the God or Goddess, or however you style the divine, need human help to get things right? Shouldn’t we assume that He or She knew what they were doing? Wouldn’t the genuinely faithful have a little, well, faith that everything is just precisely as it should be, including our own miserable, sniveling selves?

So Christianity is pretty bad, but the other religions are hardly better

Christianity is the worst in this regard assuming, as it does, that all men, and even women, are not only born fatally flawed, but will be tortured and/or destroyed by the divine unless they submit to a bizarre and highly variable set of rules and contort their reasoning powers to accept evidence free propositions, for example that the all-that-is was created a few thousand years ago by their preferred theocrat in a literal six days, or that said theocrat, once upon a time, flooded the entire Earth in a fit of pique. And in most versions of this cheerful belief system, even rigorous adherence to such inanities is not enough to guarantee salvation; worshipers are still subject to divine whim. So the Creator, in their view, is an inscrutable, capricious, murderous jerk, and I know I don’t like it when people say that about me.

So Christianity is pretty bad, but the other religions are hardly better. Hinduism seems to describe a snakes and ladders game of reincarnation, with the Divine as a martinet taskmaster, demoting those who slip up in some manner. Per Islam, God is a bit of a narcissistic authoritarian requiring an almost fetishistic obedience. And even Buddhism, which usually gets a free ride from us godless liberals, asserts that we are born to suffering and must discipline ourselves stringently if we are ever to escape this wheel of misery. But really, religion has to posit that humans are somehow lacking, for otherwise there would be no need for religion; and from a religion’s point of view, where’s the fun in that?

My own belief, and a core tenet of my faith, the Church of Universal Love and Truth, is that we humans, in all our profane excess, are perfect just as we are, by divine grace, and that the Divine One is a kind and jovial being, chiefly concerned with fulfilling all our desires and being amused by our picaresque antics. In fact God, as I conceive Him, lets only one thing occasionally get under His skin, and that happens… when humans insist on being rude.

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it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack in a minefield while being fired upon, while also staying alert for exploding needles

Touch a person where they hurt, and they will fairly often scream, “religion”. So much of our pain derives from out attempts to be right with God that it seems like nations should consider imposing strict controls on the practice, much as they license and regulate driving, drugs, guns and other activities too dangerous for children and idiots.

But what am I saying? Of course nations regulate religion and other belief systems, and the Chinese Government’s attempts to co-opt Tibetan Buddhism are not essentially different from Saudi Arabia’s promotion of its preferred flavor of Islamic Fundamentalism or the nexus of money, false piety, and guaranteed votes that we in America are pleased to call the “Religious Right”. In these cases, and in all such cases, the irreducible formula is always the same; the sincere eternal aspirations of the many are made to serve the temporal ambitions of the cynical few.

That being the case—and who am I to dispute the entire corpus of human history?—one is tempted to suggest that as a general rule legitimate religion must always be out of favor with the State, must always be found among a society’s persecuted minorities. So societal disapproval can be seen as a necessary prerequisite of genuine spiritual intrusion, but necessary is not necessarily sufficient; mere persecution does not make a Christ of a Koresh and execution by the State, though a promising start, is not in every case the seal of God’s anointed. Sometimes the slaughter of innocents is simply a case of mistaken identity, or overly broad application of a common lead based pesticide.

So for the seeker of Truth or God or Spirit or some other Capitalized Noun the situation is somewhat more difficult than looking for a needle in a haystack; it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack in a minefield while being fired upon, while also staying alert for exploding needles. Forced to search in society’s lunatic fringe by the nature of power, but impelled back to the center by the mandates of love, the sincere spiritual aspirant is fairly often paranoid, manic, frantic and exhausted, and not the kind of person who automatically inspires trust. He or she might even be impoverished, the certain mark of a pariah in our culture.

But here’s the thing; these hopelessly marginalized individuals seem to inspire inordinate dread in the halls of power. Their living room meetings are spied on, their leaders are assassinated by useful idiots with tenuous military connections, their movements are discredited by vicious propaganda… in some ways, they are the ones who seem to have power, while governments are reduced to the bullying tactics of the weak. It’s a puzzling situation, and I don’t know what to make of it. But the next time I happen across some lunatic explaining the evils of fluoride, or a UFO cult member, or a didgeridoo playing swami… well, I may not sign up for whatever program she’s offering, but I’ll probably give her a listen.

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