My second monthly column is up at 1-900-HOT-DOG (and on its Patreon), and hoo boy, it was a doozy. Light Emerging is a whole lot of wild claims, and even with hard cuts, I had to cram it into 800 words past my target word count.
I tried not to make fun of the author’s metaphysical beliefs so much as her assertions that science backed them up, even using an extremely broad definition of “science.” I grew up in a religion that taught me men in frocks can shoo away the devil with a splash of water, as if the lord of lies were an alley cat. And what’s extra crazy about that is the devil isn’t real. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he exists.
But while the Catholic Church generally just publishes vague treatises on how the dawn of cloning affirms the dignity of humanity, and why an old man on a throne of gold wants you to send money, Light Emerging asserts many noumena that cannot be measured or determined as observable phenomena for anyone with enough midichlorians. Along the way, it gets so deep up its own ass about the fourth dimension and souls playing your
And to stave off the criticism that I don’t understand it, I get it perfectly. I spent all of 2020 researching emanative Gnosticism, and what that didn’t inform for this book’s overboiled Liber AL, you can almost entirely glean from reading Promethea and The Invisibles. In fact, you should. Those books are way more entertaining, and the made-up characters are likable.
Things like the Holy Spirit being a retcon of God’s wife Asherah, the energetic circuit from the Monad to the total sum of all possibilities and back again…you’d come to this in a short period of reading 20th century mysticism. It’s not that the mysteries of this book are over anyone’s head, it’s that it goes just as far as what feels right, makes up an immense amount without any basis beyond “Ancient peoples knew this,” and then dusts its hands, nodding “Just so!” in satisfaction.
Naturally the book has five stars across Amazon and GoodReads from readers who already had its premises in hand. The mark of any cult is how much time its members have to waste sitting around and asserting, “This is so true.” Like the entirety of comments on this bullshit TED Talk. Garbage like this makes The Daily Mail, of all dishrags, seem like the reasonable party, and that I can’t forgive.
I read a theory once that all this post-modern mysticism arises from our being wired to seek out threats and opportunities. In the absence of the former and the abundance of the latter, that animal instinct seeks out a channel, and so you get our current spate of anti-vaccine concerned moms who are “jUsT tRYiNg to eDucATe to make informed decisions!” But the volume of information isn’t equal to the quality of that information, and a widely repeated lie doesn’t have more merit
You want actual guidance from someone who has faced adversity? Here’s a TED Talk from Sam Berns, who passed away from progeria.
This kid had more emotional and mental balance by 17 than most of us figure out in our entire lives. He loved sports and band and scouting and comic books, and I think we could have had some nice conversations. The world needed more of him, and less of this spiritual filler.
Here’s another great talk. Robert Hoge was a child with a facial deformity, and suffered the most painful rejections from family and society from his cradle. That’s horrific for anyone, but especially a child who hasn’t been given the tools to deal with other people’s bullshit. The pain radiates from his speech, but so does the humor and the triumph of learning to love himself. I’d take five minutes of his life advice over a year of having my auric field’s soul-bonds reattached by a bullshit artist. It’s one of the most powerful speeches it’s ever been my pleasure to watch.
If I sound extra snotty about this, I’m tired. I’m tired of our national pastime of adding bullshit to things to sell solutions to it. Each country, as Fargo‘s Loy Cannon observed, has its own type of criminal, and America’s is the con artist. We have so much and share so little, our culture is not to get what we need to be healthy and happy, but to secure against fear of not having enough. Our national talent is for hucksters to trick us into robbing ourselves.
So I’m tired of the Joel Osteens, the Trumps, the Falwells, and the endless array of purported psychics showing up to sell you books about seeing leprechauns pretending to contact dead celebrities, or extending parents’ grief with false hope of aid in the search for lost children. It’s bullshit: the unnecessary addition of material makes a situation worse, and no other country does bullshit better than America.
And I’m tired of how hard we make it to get actual help. I found out while I was working on this column that cancer had claimed my fellow Cracked and CBS writer E. Reid Ross. Ezra was a must-see when I’d get anywhere near Baltimore, or if he’d be in NYC. He was funny and he was smart and he loved this planet’s wealth of weird animals, and I miss him. No amount of gold could cure his cancer, Barbara Ann Benton. His 2020 was full of a lot of pain and struggle and doctors, who were probably volunteering their every free minute to repel the holographic vibration known as COVID-19. They took exceptional steps to help him. I couldn’t go see him.
There’s a society among Cracked contributors: we recognized that we had found the focal point for the smart-aleck kids in class who now just wanted to make each other laugh. The best compliment and the fastest camaraderie was how often one of us would chuckle or guffaw reading each other’s work. Ezra’s work was always entertaining to read through for pleasure before giving it editorial eyes. If you’ve ever laughed at his work on Cracked or CBS, I hope you’ll plant a tree in his memory or buy his books or donate to help cover his family’s costs.
Anyway, enjoy the lines I had to cut for space, I guess.
Apocryphal one-liners
Why does really good soup smell indistinguishable from terrible body odor?
What does the human soul taste like?
Cleaning crystals of low vibrations with an energy blast from your third eye and a karate chop.
Who needs data and peer-review when you possess the Eye of Agamotto?
Name two things in your life that cave dwellers made better than you enjoy now, and neither of them can be “tender love under the stars.” Food, medicine, and video games are all a thousand times better than any point in history.