Flights of Vanity
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This rant certainly won’t endear me to the few video-content creators of my acquaintance, so I won’t be sharing it widely. While there are a handful I respect for their professionalism, I imagine they could become expert at anything they attempt; the rest seem to subscribe to the notion that “It’s so simple a cave-man could do it,” and demonstrate that mistaken belief every time they open their mouths. They are right up there with the AI-besotted artistic wannabes who couldn’t draw a stick-figure unaided or write a whole sentence composed of anything other than word fragments. I’d hate to think we are becoming creatively as well as culturally bankrupt, but these phenomena may just be shining a spotlight on something that is already well-known about the modern climate of entitlement and instant gratification: we want it easy and we want it now. John Cleese had a few choice things to say about it in Monty Python’s “Architect Sketch.” (Come to think of it, so did Ayn Rand a long time ago.)
Anyway, on to the point of this essay.
An online friend mentioned that blogs seem to be a making a comeback. I’ve been plugging away steadily at this one for almost six years now, so my first reaction was “From where?” But I haven’t been blind to the fact that video presentations via YouTube and other social-media platforms have been in the ascendancy at the expense of the written word (which I doubt the younger spawn of the American education system can even read with passable fluency and appropriate persistence).
I have to confess that I have little tolerance for “talking heads,” an aversion that goes back to the transition of mainstream TV networks from “hard news” to “soft” opinion pieces that spout propaganda for the cultural arbiters of the current socio-political agenda while offering little other than “predigested” information. The well-reasoned sentence is of far more value to me than the well-turned “sound bite.” I can’t help but think that the video revolution is an exercise in preening self-flattery by those who like to hear themselves speak. If it isn’t actually hubris or arrogance, it is almost certainly inflated self-opinion that in the final analysis may be completely unjustified. (But who among their worshipful followers is going to tell them that?) For the record, if I ever start sounding like an overstuffed know-it-all, just ignore me and hopefully it will pass.
I try to keep intellectual grandstanding out of my own written work; if I suspect it’s creeping in I will defuse it with wry (usually self-deprecating) humor. The online purveyors of audiovisual wisdom may seem to be “the best thing since sliced bread,” but quite frankly I’d rather slice my own, and in most cases I have the ability and experience to do so. (How’s that for a self-serving plug?) Some of the topics I cover are decidedly abstruse and demand an elevated “occult” vocabulary, but I try to avoid the “two-dollar” word when the “ten-cent” one will suffice. I love Peter Gabriel’s song Big Time that skewers the small-town protagonist’s obsession with preparing for a move to the big city: “I’m stretching my mouth/To let those big words come right out.”
As I see it, mystical sensitivity coupled with cerebral acuity is a gift given to very few, and many of those so blessed adhere to the admonitory capstone of the maxim “To Know, To Will, To Dare and To Keep Silent.” Esoteric study and practice are usually best undertaken in private, and trumpeting one’s accomplishments to the world — even if only by example and not by proclamation — can devalue the estimation of their worth in the cosmic scheme of things. Familiarity breeds contempt in the hearts of those who think they can “go the Master one better.” (Although it’s unfashionable in these hyper-vigilant times of anxious correctness in all social matters, one might think of it as “casting pearls before swine.”) I won’t attempt to elucidate for others what I don’t comprehend in sufficient detail myself, but by the same token I won’t try to skip learning everything I think I need to know to be capable of doing so with credibility and confidence. There is no substitute for a sound knowledge base as an antidote for the unabashed gibberish that passes for metaphysical authenticity in some circles.
The problem with so much mystical experience is that there are no agreed-upon measures by which to establish its veracity (the existence of which would immediately render it non-mystical, eh?). Each person’s individual encounter with Spirit is as valid as every other’s from a subjective standpoint, which is perfectly fine as long as no push is made by the revelator to foist it on the rest of us as “the only way.” We already have enough ecclesiastical institutions and priesthoods trying to convince us of their absolute authority in this regard (and far too many divination books with “The Only Way to Learn” in their title).
I often suspect that none of the Christian saints had an inkling they were going to be canonized, but that the original authors of the Bible and its subsequent revisionists (all of whom we can assume were men and not God incarnate) had every intention of being endlessly quoted for their elaborate pseudo-history, perhaps only because of their delusion of infallibility over what is transparently a period-piece dressed up as moral allegory with pretensions of grandeur. It was the collusion of spiritual and secular authority in the Middle Ages that made the Abrahamic religions what they are today, but at least in the West we are slowly shaking them off.
In a rational world, fundamentalism seems like a mental aberration, but then I guess the same charge could be leveled at the gratuitous assumptions underlying all forms of visionary awareness that are predicated on non-empirical principles. Personally, I hope tarot remains a niche market and never becomes an established commercial commodity that attracts more opportunistic shills and hucksters than it already endures; if I’m going to make any money from it (emphatically not my goal), I want it to be for my thinking and writing, not for selling my soul to “Sideshow Bob.” Apart from that reservation, I doubt I would be very good at YouTube anyway since it would feel like staring into a void while howling in the wilderness.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on June 18, 2023.
