Yesterday evening I had dinner in Barcelona with some friends, and then caught the last train back to Sitges. So there I was, at midnight, sitting on a Spanish train rereading Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning novel "The Man in the High Castle," and I got to thinking how much of what he was saying in it reminded me of FFL, and some of the things said here.
The novel is an "alternative future," in which Germany and Japan won World War II, and so there are some musings in it about the "German character" and the "German mentality." You know them -- the ones that drove them to eradicate Jews and other non-Aryans and try to rule the world and make it over into the idealized image they had of it in their minds, the image they assumed came from God, and that came only to them, because they alone were godly. Then I got home and spent a few minutes scanning FFL, and watching Off melt down and find a reason to condemn almost everyone in the universe except himself, and find ways to excuse Maharishi for backing insane dictators. I saw him claim that Maharishi had said that Hitler was "near enlight- enment," and remembered hearing Maharishi saying that myself. Then I thought about Judy and some of the other TM TBs on this forum, and the kinds of things they say about their fellow seekers and their fellow man, as if they didn't really CONSIDER these other people their "fellow man," but something *lesser*, something foul and in the way of the realization of their greater vision for what the world could be. And then I read Dick Mays' mindless reposting of the latest mindless blurb about Vastu, and Doug's mindful satire about the Global Committee for Safety and Purity of the Teaching, Vigilantes for the Age of Enlightenment, and remembered the times in the TM movement when such things were NOT satire, but everyday reality. And then I read some more of Off's meltdown, and rants by other people who still believe, after all these years, that they can control the weather and stock markets and, basically, control all of the things they don't like in the world just by *willing* the things they don't like to just GO AWAY, and I sat amazed at the levels of insanity I was reading, and shook my head and decided to go to bed. But then I decided to reread one last passage from PKD before drifting off to sleep. In it, he has one of his characters ponder the mentality of the Germans who started World War II (and who, in this novel, won it, and shortly thereafter exterminated not only the Jews, but pretty much anyone else on the planet they felt superior to, including almost all of Africa). This was written in 1962, Philip K. Dick in the mind of one of his characters, pondering, trying to "get a handle" on the insanity he saw in the WWII-era German mind. I think that his insights are still relevant, and somewhat applicable to the insanity of modern-day spiritual True Believers: But, Baynes thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it? He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is -- their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, intuit it. But -- they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something fren- zied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia. Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but air abstraction: race, land, Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, the here, the now, into the vast deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because even- tually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they -- these madmen -- respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inamimate; they want to aid Nature. And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is the inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
