Champagne and Gruel

My battle with culture persists.

In April 1994, the title track from Madonna’s “Bedtime Stories” album hit the airways in the United States. The song was written as a collaboration between Icelandic singer Björk and producers Nellee Hooper and Marius De Vries at Madge’s behest, having managed to persuade the initially reluctant swan-bird to join the roost.

The resulting lyrics were decidedly more avant garde than Madonna’s previous offerings, opening up a dialogue of interpretation that ranged from the ludicrously benign “let’s sleep together” and “the exploration of feelings so powerful they transcend language”, to a deeper pointing toward recognizing and surrendering to the substance from which all consciousness arises and inevitably returns to: the unconscious Beingness. This level of poetic realness, coupled with the throbbing futuristic landscape of sound, generated a masterpiece thirty years ahead of its time…

…And the era of its true relevance has come.

Today is the last day, that I am using words. They’ve gone out, lost their meaning. Don’t function anymore.

Forgive the unintentionally dramatic overtone here but the honest to god truth is that I never want to read anything or hear anyone speak ever again. I exist in a realm of understanding that thought can’t touch and coming back to the province of personhood from my sojourns in this exquisite ether is a tedium that’s taken me some time to make peace with. Every so often, for entertainment purposes only, I watch the unit relent a few hours of its attention span, furiously trying to eek a fix from the great dark-web dopamine dealer, but always to no avail. Everything everywhere is words and information that must be endured and quantized—courses, lectures, Netflix storytelling with derivations so thinly veiled, it’s full-frontal infantilization. Culture has become a bazaar of cheap bullshit and dim illuminations offered over by dilettantes that barely got hold of yesterday what they’re selling a course on today. This is the era of midwittian expertise and prolific mediocrity. The pace of the cultural conveyor belt, the decimation of the collective attention span, the gorge of late-stage capitalism, the obsession with youth, and the eradication of the gatekeepers of art and mysticism—these influences have all converged, creating an unbearably schizophrenic culture where ninety-nine percent of what’s on offer is disposable palaver spoken by those who have accumulated thoughts with no wisdom behind them in an effort to sell you something you don’t need.

And in the rare instance that from this intergalactic bowl of gruel a voice of elevated capacity emerges as a beacon, more often than not any innate knowing by spirit is completely blinded by the veil of intellect, as is the great folly of mankind. The most comprehensively promising intellectual minds of this Twitter generation can’t even fathom concepts as spiritually basic as inherited generational trauma and energetic transference. The unparalleled obstinacy of Big Science™ to belligerently attempt finding causation in the realm of effect is really something to behold. Unsurprisingly, every prophet since the dawn of time has known that the intellectual mind does not reach to the mystical mind. You cannot know truth. You can only be it without knowing. Everything that is known is filtered through the perception of an imagined individual entity called “I”, whose actions are assumed to be “mine” and whose perceptions are viewed as “objective reality”, when in truth neither the “I” perceiving reality nor the reality that the “I” perceives are objectively real.

Years ago I started writing about the problems of personhood, with the inevitable end-roads of those musings published here but, needless to say, the neighborhood’s evolved a bit. “I’ve” moved past the state of thinking, past what little need I ever had to consume words and thought, and have relocated so thoroughly into the state of being that the irony of formulating an innate knowing—or more obscurely, a vibe—into concepts, translating the concepts into words, typing them out and proofreading them, is more than I can bear. Oftentimes, I can be found watching the wind move through the trees for hours because its randomness is infinitely more intellectually stimulating and spiritually fulfilling than anything available on my devices. I don’t want to suffer through another lukewarm, threadbare storyline, fictional or “not”. I don’t want to listen to more YouTube-ian monotone or endure the rationalizations of a pseudo-scientific intellectual who hasn’t yet had an awakening as they try to explain away reality. I sure as hell don’t want the brainrot that Tiktok has on offer.

I want transcendent vibes. I want telepathy and intrigue. This is more than a desire for ambiance, although that is undoubtedly a necessary part. I am always looking for transportive and engrossing awe. I want to forget myself into something so beautiful that, forever onward, I am made inseparable from it—a realm where the loose, atmospheric translation of ethereal being hangs in the air like smoke coils from ceremonial incense. For me, the lure of the ether is in the ease of movement. And yet, here I am, having the flesh experience.

Words are useless, especially sentences. They don’t stand for anything. How could they explain how I feel? ………………Traveling… leaving logic and reason…

The concept of Darshan comes to mind. Look into the gurus eyes and they will deliver the truth to you. At this point, is there any other way to communicate? The waning crescent of my patience for this medieval realm of exactitude casts its tiny sliver of light onto a previously unseen angle in my mind. It occurs to me that the truncation of attention span is simply what moving toward living completely in the present moment looks like before you’ve actually gotten there. The capacity for concentration will continue to abbreviate until living in time, in thought, in concepts, is completely obsolete. And then, the dawn—that there is only this; no other this to be had. And the recognition of this is, for the human race, a very imminent reality.

The black roses on my table are seething their carnal perfume as my fingertips caress the velvet pillow at my side. An emerald bohemia cut-crystal tumbler holds a fizzy something that dances beneath my nose and lips. A murder of candles flicker in tiny wild rebellion, casting shadows that suggest a mythos from the realm of the unthought known. I am here, there, and everywhere. There is nothing more to be attained.

And all that you’ve ever learned… Try to forget. I’ll never explain again.

---