“Sometimes Satan comes as a Man of Peace.”
Bob Dylan said that.
Now, Bob Dylan is not the ultimate authority, far from it I would presume. But he bears paying attention to by virtue of the fact that he is a well read, self-educated, and very well traveled Troubadour. Dylan has a gift of words, but besides that, and most importantly, he has developed the gifts of honesty, of seeing, and of understanding, to enhance his ability to communicate. They are, what has become, his human, and artistic brilliance. The gift of words, without honesty, without seeing, and without understanding, is just a shallow imitation of wisdom. It would make him a pretender, rather than a sage. Dylan has wedded these gifts like light is connected to the break of day.
One cannot see, or understand, the broader world without first seeing, and understanding, himself. There are a lot of pretenders out there. A lot of self-absorbed, self-ordained, wordy, pseudo-spiritual pied-piper wannabe’s mumbling senseless concepts like they were truth: People who are actually afraid of seeing, or understanding, themselves; afraid they’ll come up wanting on anybody’s scale of significance. People who feel their choice of cereal in the morning to be of actual importance to somebody other than themselves. To complicate matters, some of them are actually well meaning, just lost in their own reflection.
But most of them are not. Most of them are quite calculating.
There has, unfortunately, been no shortage of these narcissists willing to fill the void found in the inadequacy of others.
The 60’s gave us Timothy Leary, and Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), who, by the way, attached himself to Bob Dylan like a leach to his groin. Dylan had the good sense to eventually disassociate himself from Mr. Dass, knowing that he was just a phony angel of light. He was really about drugs, and satisfying his own lust. These wannabe sages have surfaced in every generation. Funny, how they actually all start out pretending they’re about enlightenment, but end up really just being about sex and drugs.
The 70’s gave us Moses David and the Children of God, Werner Erhard’s EST, Berkeley’s Adi Da/Bubba Free John and India’s Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There was also Korea’s notorious Sun Myung Moon (the Moonies).
In the 80’s it was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Jim and Tami Faye Bakker, (along with many other disingenuous, and dysfunctional, Christian evangelists).
The 90’s brought L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology to the forefront through David Misavige, while Kabbalah came into it’s own prominence by means of the L.A. Center’s leader, ‘Rabbi’ Michael Berg. We have countless ‘laughing gurus’, Amma, the ‘hugging guru’, the mysterious Maitreya, ‘world teacher’, and others too numerous to mention. This bourgeoning spiritual underbelly continues to solicit our attention, knowing instinctively when we, as a culture, are ripe for bogus spiritual influence.
And, we have never been as ripe as we are right now.
Failed ministers, self-aggrandizing poets, and unscrupulous psychology-philosophy-theology professors are rushing in to ‘meet the need’.
Most of the self-proclaimed prophets, seers, and psychological droolers I’ve mentioned have overlapped the decades, and have, in fact, carried on well into the present; but they are stale, as lies and half-truths eventually become. Countless others, however, are joining in the guru competition, picking up disillusioned young people, disenfranchised middle-agers, and celebrities of all sorts along the way. These unscrupulous ‘ministers of light, and love’ have always targeted the psychologically needy, quickly transforming them into myopic, self-deluded followers they can very easily continue to manipulate. They have always targeted self-absorbed celebrities as well, who will, ultimately, do their recruiting for them. Celebrities have money, they’re high profile, many of them are some of the biggest idiots on the planet, and they’re often starved for some kind of spiritual substance in their lives. But more importantly, they influence the rest of us, assuring that these babbling figureheads have a constant flow of money, and adulation, to support their egocentric pathologies.
Do I sound serious about my disdain for manipulators of the weak and the unconscious?
You picked right up on that.
You really can’t do anything about these people, but ignore them. I don’t have much sympathy for the privileged followers, they have choices, but unfortunately, a lot of impressionable young people don’t know enough to ignore them because these ‘emissaries of consciousness’ dispense their blather in attractive packages. But once in awhile their true nature gets revealed. Once in awhile they sell another piece of their own soul, wrapped in the same attractive package they’ve been selling their senseless concepts in. I’m not talking about the Snoopdog’s of the world, or the Ed Rosenthal’s, or the other dime-store philosophers who dispense ‘wisdom’ out of a baggie. Everybody knows what to expect from those losers. I’m talking about the phony angels of light, and love, the proclaimers of peace, who stoop to their baser nature one day, selling their followers the poison they’ve been using, and the next day delivering the same old enlightenment mantra out of both sides of their disingenuous mouth.
Reminds me of what Devo once said about themselves.
“We are not men.”
Devo, however, was spoofing their own persona.
These people are not.
What if one day these guys just decided to stand up and be men? Not male imitators, but actual men? Men do not manipulate others to exalt themselves, or to get ahead. And they do not spout new-age blather to seduce the naïve.
Being a man is facing life, and the world, as it is, and dealing with it from a position of honesty and INTEGRITY. It is calling duplicitous behavior what it is, dishonest, whether it be one’s own, or someone else’s. Being a man is in not attaching integrity to whatever one decides to do. That is called relativity. It is in not creating one’s own relative world to float around in like a jellyfish, dispensing anesthesia like it were some kind of illumination. And it is not being a phony angel of light, and love. Although Bob Dylan uses Satan in an illustrative sense, the sentiment, nevertheless, is as profound as the sun is hot.
“Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.”
Or light, or love.
Or consciousness.
I don’t understand why these morally impotent frauds don’t just get honest with themselves? It would give them the stature they’ve always sought, but which has eluded them like light underground. And it would help them cut the strings to kill the phony dance they are orchestrating as their own proverbial puppet masters.
If you know one of these guru’s, or guru wannabe’s, I would suggest you separate yourself from him, or her. They will sweeten the pudding with just enough sugar to disguise the flavor of the poison.
I understand that.
