[MD] Platt's Pure Critique of Pantheism

[John Carl]

"The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to
suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a
while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus, but also
to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of
existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us….

 I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a
vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly
ascribed qualities, even the categories of scientific description. To meet
God or Medusa face to face, even it it means risking everything human in
myself.

I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a
nonhuman world ad yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.
Paradox and Bedrock.

Well, the sun will be up in a few minutes and I haven’t even begun to make
coffee.”

Ed Abbey--Desert Solitaire, The First Morning

"The addicts of the occult and the Eastern religions have always been among
us, but probably never before have so many abandoned realism and naturalism
and rushed to embrace the fantasies of spiritualism, the life weariness of
Buddhism, the world negation of Hinduism, the doper's heaven of
institutional Christianity.  As an antidote to a poisonous overdose of
technology and crazy rationality, I can understand why so many of the
spiritually sick have switched to Zen, om, I Ching, and tarot.  As an
approach to effective resistance against the on-coming tyranny of the
machine, however, these worn-out doctrines ands obscure little magics will
prove as futile as the machine can/will prove fatal.

In fact there is no reason why psychedelics and occultists, for example, and
the most sophisticated technetronic systems cannot comfortably coexist--the
former inside the latter.  They do; and they will.  I find it ironic to see
the enthusiasm with which hairy little gurus from the sickliest nation on
earth (India) are welcomed by the technological idiots of California.
 Computerology, futurology, "high" technology and astrology--basic
superstitions of our time-- are all comfortably compatible.

In this embrace of easily reconcilable opposites I wish to stand apart,
alone if need be, and hold up the ragged flag of reason.  Reason with a
capital R-- Sweet Reason, the newest and rarest thing in human life, the
most delicate child of human history.  Reason without technology, if that
seems best; reason without science, if that's necessary.  By "reason" I mean
intelligence informed by sympathy, knowledge in the arms of love.  (For
knowledge without conscience is the ruin of the soul, sayeth the
Proverb--and the oldest wisdom is usually most reliable.)  By "reason" I
mean fidelity to what alone we really know and really must love--this one
life, this one earth on which we live.  I find myself equally opposed to the
technological mania of the West and the occult morbidity of the East;  Both
are the enemies of reason, and of life, and of the earth."


Ed Abbey, Science With a Human Face