Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: Yes, I was born in 1939, so we're the same, came along
with the same wave.
TRIP: Muz, you write so well, and the way you write is the kind of
writing that I love which is real life, it's dramatic. It just really
appeals to me. I'm going to read something that you wrote about
your childhood. It's good, it's about a page, and I'm going to read
it because it strikes that tone that I feel so many young people like
me had, and the Wizard too. You wrote, "I dragged myself through
the mean streets (London) of what others considered the "real
world" as if through purgatorial treacle (molasses).
School was an asylum for psychological misfits called teachers who
attempted to rule by screaming, hurling books, endless canings, or
hissing threats, which created a white-out in my mind, rendering
me incapable of learning school subjects for many years. Was this
how life was meant to be lived, I wondered, but what else was
there? Being sent to Sunday school and subjected to this
sugarcoated evangelism of Christian good-bodies did nothing to
fill the gap, but only increased my desolation of soul. For even
then at the age of seven or eight, I perceived with a nauseous
certainty that they neither understood nor truly believed what they
were telling us kids, but needed us to believe them to make them
feel secure. The disgust that this inspired in me created a deepseated
aversion to evangelism and all things even faintly smelling
of religion for all of my teenage years.
I grew up considering myself a professional atheist, I was anti-
God, and anti-religion and proud of it, therefore my about-face
was all the more miraculous to me when it occurred. It was years
before I realized that atheism was as much a conditioned religion
of ignorance as any mindless religious fundamentalism. What I'd
always been seeking unknowingly was spirituality as opposed to
religiosity, but I had always derived some spiritual solace from
nature. Perhaps I had the makings of a mystic even as a teenager
as I used to regularly get up at dawn and cycle out of the city to the
woods and sit there for an hour or so listening to the sounds of the
natural world awakening. Or I would go to my favorite spinney at
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