The bankruptcy of Philosophy on our present planet is rather obvious.  There is not only less and less of genuine thinking by human beings on the planet, but less and less interest in learning to do genuine thinking.  There are fewer philosophers and fewer people who want to learn to do philosophy.  So there is this massive widespread failure of intellect throughout the world.  The search for Truth, for Greater Truth, for Cosmic Truth, for Spiritual Truth, for Existential Truth, is dying.  Humanity is sinking fast into complete stupidity and chaos.  There is an obvious mental destruction, a disintegration everywhere, an increasing collective insanity and emotional depression.

 

Now, since there is no hope for institutional learning, for an intellectual and spiritual awakening of mankind, what are you and I as isolated thoughtful individuals going to do?  In my opinion, if you want to hear it, we need a new approach to Conscious Being.  I know that I am; you know that you are.  This is our most fundamental, central and core knowledge.  The Twentieth Century Sage of India, Nisargadatta, endlessly suggested that he had gotten to a very high state of consciousness in himself by concentrating day and night on fundamental consciousness-of-being, on the simple, devastating and continuous central fact of “I am”.  René Descartes, the father of modern Western Philosophy, also got almost there with his idea of “I think, therefore I am.”  The “I am” was therefore the most important conclusion of all thinking.  Later, Martin Heidegger saw that our most fundamental and pure access to All Being is through our own Being.

 

To be conscious means that we have conscious being before it means anything else.  But we cannot identify consciousness wholly with physical sensation.  We have states of inner mind, including dreams and deep dreamless sleep, that indicate spiritual, non-physical dimensions of conscious being beyond the body.  Near death experiences of many people (myself included) indicate transcendental beyond-sensation realms of consciousness.  The body dies, but consciousness as such does not die, however heavenly or hellish, detached or reincarnationally driven, this over-arching continuity of conscious being may be.  So there is more to I am, to conscious being, than meets-the-eye of the daily physical world.  The I am, the consciousness-of-being, has a deeply urgent personal meaning for us that is connected to our inevitable personal death, just as it is connected to our dreaming in our subtle body, our deep sleep in our causal body of dark spiritual ignorance, and ultimately to our most Divine and true consciousness as a pure Spirit, Atman, Purusha, Self-nature, Swabhava, Innate Buddha, or God-Star (as in Crowley’s “Each man and woman is a star”).  Conscious Being is unavoidably Metaphysical, which must be experienced and not merely believed or concluded.  Metaphysical thinking (philosophy) must proceed to Metaphysical experiencing (Yoga or Mysticism).

 

The new approach to Conscious Being is therefore to self-activate genuine thinking and direct self-experiencing as an urgent personal self-awakening and self-initiative.  No one can do for you or me what we have to do for ourselves.  It is more than merely influencing or being influenced about Conscious Being.  If we allow this to be a mere social topic for our they-self of social identity in the outer world of mere physical sensation and talk, we miss the direct targets of our own authentic and resolute thinking and self-realization.  So the new approach is also the renewal personally and individually of the most ancient approach, the Adi Yoga, Original Way of direct transcendental experiencing.  As modern, contemporary men and women, we face the same central challenge of our Conscious Being, or I am, that the most ancient men and women of ancient civilizations faced.  The eternal question of Being Conscious, of what that really means, must be renewed in our own Being Conscious or we are not real beings and have no real Consciousness!

 

A mere social self trying to be important and influential is always missing the point of the opportunity for totally conscious and real Being.  That we read or write philosophical articles or books for each other is merely social distraction if we are not doing daily and continuous Yoga of self-realization along with truly original thinking about the issues.  Each day brings primarily the challenge of thinking and experiencing, with talking and sharing wholly secondary.  In the school of Mexican Sorcery, this is the issue of the Nagual and the Tonal; in Zen, the issue of Host and Guest; in the Sufi Way, the issue of the Cosmic Self and the Social Self.  No tradition as such owns this issue exclusively.  It is the social or false self, the persona or mask, that has a collective identity of “belonging” to a tradition or culture.  To identify with an outer religion or tradition is itself the physical materialism of the physical sensory self.  It is what Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”, but only if you can look beyond his own stupid, ignorant and socially expansive identification with “being” a Tibetan Buddhist, a “reincarnated Lama” and all that nonsense, though clearly it might be a natural concentration of a hard-working soul to incarnate as a Tibetan over-and-over to perfect a certain kind of Yoga there in that way, which would no longer be so easy now that the evil, materialistic Chinese have virtually destroyed Tibetan civilization.

 

So we are now trying to discuss and think about real thinking and direct realizing of full-blown Conscious Being.  This is our primary daily central challenge.  Everything else, however noble or necessary the work or conversation, tends to be a huge distraction of the restless physical and social bodily self.  Again and again, we need to look at the questions and imperatives raised by Martin Heidegger and Nisargadatta.  And we do not need the majority of stupid, proud and insane humanity to wake-up and recognize the urgent, central significance of authentic Philosophy or genuinely direct Self-realizing Yoga.  We can watch or witness as Real Transcendental Conscious Beings, the majority of stupid humanity and their criminally insane political leaders sinking into their increasing incompetence and self-destruction without identifying ourselves with all that pain and futility.  We can existentially write-off humanity in general.  Our individual cosmic journey, our own intellectual and spiritual adventure, is what really counts here.  We include sexual fulfillments and doing good professional works, but we are not rigidly stuck in materialistic sensate outer being.  We are authentic and resolute Existential Tantrics, people of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, the T.A.Z. of Hakim Bey.  We are Free Thinkers and Free Spirits.

 

Conscious Being is infinite conscious beings pervading the Multiverse, the Darma Dhatu, the Realm of Totality.  It is the Hwa Yen Sutra and Pratyagatmanda’s Patent Wonder. It is Zen Master Dogen reincarnated as Martin Heidegger and Henry David Thoreau reincarnated as Krishnamurti.  We are all working very hard on Self-realization.  Therefore, all pettiness about Philosophy and Religion has to stop!  Pettiness of the materialistic professors has been destroying philosophy, just as pettiness of traditional spiritual authorities has been destroying the spiritual quest for God-conscious Self-realization.  There is even pettiness in extraterrestrial civilizations and their Earth abductees; pettiness is a mental disease that afflicts even extraterrestrial beings, if you have bothered to process the vast body of growing information of interactions with people of the troubled humanity of our present planet.  Pettiness, lack of real thinking and self-realization in extraterrestrials cannot possibly help reverse pettiness on Earth.  It just creates a grander veil over Reality, a galactic extension of ignorant social selfhood.  Marciniak’s and Meier’s Pleaideans, for instance, are unbelievably bourgeois bores!  They are hardly more advanced philosophically or spiritually than hyper-Americans or hyper-Europeans.  They lack the magic of the Carlos Castaneda books, the brilliant connectivity of the Sufis, the depth of Indian Metaphysics, the urgent questions of Existentialism, the vastness of Hwa Yen Zen.  They are hardly more than arrogant government officials.  They are barely distinguishable from the robots that water their lawns.  So we cannot expect much philosophically or spiritually from the current extraterrestrials interacting with Earth-people.  So far they are useless for Real People here on Earth.  They are just background mass futility and collective stupidity.  They, like mankind, are not really thinking and developing.  They just have slightly more advanced personal failure to be authentic and resolute in genuine individual evolution.  They need the help of the Godmen and Godwomen they ignore throughout the Galaxies.  That they can travel in space is not helping them much because they do not know where to travel, who to visit.  Their assemblage points are stuck in the normal position.

 

Conscious Being is the central issue for all beings everywhere, not just on our stupid insane planet.  But who really wants to know this?  Who wants to think for real about the implications?  It all comes down to me and you in our isolated cosmic privacy.