Most of you are in the West. But here we sit in a small town full of temples in South India, surrounded by Tamil-speaking Dravidian people who are for the most part, staunch followers of some Vedic religious and social system. How does the West stack up from this point of view?
Recently we discussed about the reactions of an insecure society to the mystic and other outsiders. Materialism is xenophobic precisely because its very foundation is insecure; it tries to eke out a secure existence in an atmosphere of constant change and ultimate death. How is any security possible in those circumstances? As a result, Western culture has to develop a mood of conformity, and an attitude of denial toward anything that tends to bust the bubble of illusion in which it exists.
From inside that bubble, it is possible to live one's whole life without any contact with an authentic transcendental experience. As long as one remains within the circumspect boundaries of one's education, career and social milieu, there is no possibility of the jarring experience of contacting Absolute Truth. However, if one begins to explore the boundaries of the Western cultural experience, say in the dusty corners of the Internet or in the lonely philosophy stacks of a good library, one begins to encounter rumors and third-hand descriptions of another reality altogether. And if one starts to hang out in certain places—among artists or hippies let's say—one may even come into contact with people who, by chance or intention, happened to discover something beyond, experience the infinite, or touch some alternate reality impossible to describe or categorize within the materialistic ontology.
Of course most of these reports are phony; they are not Absolute Truth at all, but relative illusions within the bigger material illusion, driven by psychedelic drugs, excessive passion or the facile but superficial mental tricks of impersonalism and voidism. Still they are fascinating if only because they are so different from the utterly boring stock consciousness of Western culture: a circumscribed life in an insulated bubble, a synthetic Matrix, brimming with material opulence but consigned to serving a shadow elite that strives to manipulate every thought and experience to solidify and enhance their control.
As we look back from the point of view of authentic Vedic culture to our so-called homeland, we see a nation and a people in chains. True, so far the ties that bind are mostly conceptual, social and political, but they are becoming more tangible day-by-day as the West slides further toward its inevitable denouement. The economic slavery that most Westerners live in is inconceivable to me. My whole life I studiously avoided debt, paid cash for everything and kept a low profile from the tax man. I can't believe that anyone would be foolish enough to mortgage their whole life to a treadmill of monthly payments, an existence where one's value to society is determined by his credit rating; where the life-and-death decisions of medical caregivers are determined by how much one's insurance will pay.
From here, it looks like most Westerners have made a deal with the Devil: "Let me enjoy today, and I will become your willing slave for the rest of my miserable life." Otherwise how can such a tiny percentage of the world's people use more than one-third of the world's energy and other resources? Such irresponsible greed and selfishness is simply inconceivable, and yet to give it up is, in Dick Cheney's famous words, "non-negotiable." He well knew that without the 'bread and circuses' of sense gratification, the population would rapidly become ungovernable (a nice euphemism for civil war and a failed state).
But Peak Oil means precisely that the free ride is coming to an end. The West will have to transition to a much lower standard of living in a very short time. Indeed this is already happening, as banks fail left and right, jobs flee the country like rats from a sinking ship and the average family is reduced to struggling in poverty. This is the crisis of the ontological time bomb we predicted so long ago, and it is going to get much worse before it gets better. Wait until the revelations about the origins of the Catholic church come fully to light, and the false pretentious religious foundation of Western culture is destroyed...
So from our point of view, living under a pall of materialistic illusion is not very desirable. Yes, the nice toys keep you distracted from the real issues and burning existential questions of life; the crippled, insane, sick and dying are quickly and conveniently removed from sight to some faceless institution. As long as the garbage and sewage and other undigested remnants of materialism continue to just go 'away'—wherever that is—the rot will be concealed and everything will apparently be just fine—until the whole thing collapses in a systemic collapse.
Personally I would rather confront and deal with The Hard Questions of life, even if they must remain unanswered, than live in an artificial bubble of denial. Asking the right questions is actually far more important than getting the answers, because they drive to learn, seek and search. If we do that long enough, we will come across the authentic Absolute Truth. But if one's social environment inhibits asking these all-important questions, which lead to the perfection of existence, then it is not a civilized human society but a sophisticated trap; a slave farm disguised as a workers' paradise.
parābhavas tāvad abodha-jāto
yāvan na jijñāsata ātma-tattvam
yāvat kriyās tāvad idaṁ mano vai
karmātmakaṁ yena śarīra-bandhaḥ
"As long as one does not inquire about the spiritual values of life, one is defeated and subjected to miseries arising from ignorance. Be it sinful or pious, karma has its resultant actions. If a person is engaged in any kind of karma, his mind is called karmātmaka, colored with fruitive activity. As long as the mind is impure, consciousness is unclear, and as long as one is absorbed in fruitive activity, he has to accept a material body." [Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 5.5.5]
Mystics like us are always unwelcome at the grand parade of illusion, because we keep pointing out the inconvenient truth that the Emperor has no clothes. We sit at the top of the ontological mountain; we speak from a place where the fog of illusion cannot reach. We refuse to join the herd of lemmings in their mad plunge off the cliff. Nor are we willing to sacrifice ourselves in some pointless gesture of rebellion against the Powers That Be. The whole charade of materialism is simply pointless to us. Both creating the illusion and fighting against it are irrelevant.
The real struggle is within, to cut the hard knot of illusion and let go of the attachment to false temporary enjoyment; to inquire into the Absolute Truth and realize the results of that inquiry in one's own consciousness. Without that commitment to self-realization, all other aims and activities are mere phantoms, as meaningless as the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. So we sit in our nice warm room in South India, writing our messages to a world asleep, trying our best to rouse them from their fitful dreams.
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