Spiritual War

by Skald

Our grandparents had their Great War and their Great Depression. Our War is a Spiritual War.... our Great Depression is our lives.

Thats a paraphrase from Fight Club. For me, it sums up my generation and those that have followed.

Make no mistake, we are engaged in a spiritual war with profound stakes.

And what is the nature of this war? Its a war for our psyches. Its a war to preserve poetry, euphoria, ecstasy, and transcendence. Its a war to reclaim lost archtypes: the shaman, the poet-warrior, the knight, the pilgrim, the hobopoet.

Its a war to decide if monotony, profit, banality, and bureaucracy will dominate the souls of most human beings.

Its a war of quality (direct experience, direct engagement) versus quantity (virtual reality, abstraction, numbers, money).

Its a war of machines & virtual machines (corporations) versus in-the-flesh human beings.

The battlegrounds are our consciousness, our values, our beliefs, and our everyday experiences.

Will we surrender? Will we accept a grey dystopia? Will we surrender to monotony? Will we define our lives by numbers (the number of dollars in our bank account)? Will we accept TV as reality while rejecting/neglecting the direct experience of our lives?

To get to the pulsing heart of the matter... travel, for me, is a crusade. It is my crusade in this spiritual war... my desperate act of defiance against the banal rule of business.

At times it is a euphoric crusade. At times it is lonely and heartbreaking.

For the one question I cannot escape is,... Have we already lost?

..........