Ride the King’s Highway

In the dreamstate, the only true act of madness is thinking. You can do it, but it’s strongly discouraged. Thought is what elevated Adam and Eve from common livestock to self-aware beings. They didn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Being a Dumbass, they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge is arrived at by thinking, which, in the dreamstate, is the one true sin – original sin. In our version of the story, the anti-apple agent is played by Maya, who wants us to stay half-asleep in the sewer-dungeon, and the pro-apple agent is played by the Little Bastard Within, who wants us to wake up and live our lives. Which you call God and which you call Satan depends on which way you want to go.

A&E weren’t cast out of the garden, they broke out of the pasture. They didn’t bring about the fall of man, they elevated mankind from mindless drudgery and bovine mediocrity. They didn’t cast humanity into darkness, they lifted it toward the light. A&E didn’t get kicked out of paradise, they became the forerunners of a nobler race of men. Not they themselves, but the prohibited act of thinking; still prohibited to this day. That’s the sense in which this story is interesting to us, because what A&E did is what we’re trying to do here; help you take your own game to the next level, which is always a matter of more light, which is always a matter of better thinking.

Whereas human childhood can be understood as a state of self-awareness, in which self and environment are believed to be two, human adulthood can be understood as a state of transpersonal awareness in which self and environment are known to be one. This does not happen through growth, but through the removal of the growth-retarding, vision-inhibiting placenta-like sheath of first-stage birth. Humans are meant to slough off that sheath and merge into their environment at the age of sexual maturity, but Maya has different plans for us. 

As Richard M. Bucke said, “The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self-consciousness.” In our context, a world peopled by human adults would be as far removed from the world of children as children are from beasts of the field. (As far removed as butterflies from caterpillars.) That’s the true magnitude of the developmental transition we’re talking about.

The integrated state of human adulthood is a real thing and the next step in your development, but don’t take my word for it. You made it this far, so pick up a sword and start taking heads and slaying dragons. Grab a shovel and start rerouting rivers. Go into your own attic and start opening windows. Let light in and throw trash out. Pull the sheets off all those vague and menacing shapes; dismantle them piece by piece and dispose of them. Keep tidying up until you have a clean, uncluttered mental-emotional space; bright and cheerful, with no dark corners or shadowy monsters. 

Whatever you authentically want to become, it is within your power to make it happen; the trick is in the transition from rutbound to outbound. You must go out of herd alignment before you can come into alignment with your own authentic pattern. After you complete the overdue transition of second-stage birth, the rest is growth and development, just as in first-stage birth. Forget about enlightenment and set your sights on the integrated state of human adulthood; that’s where you’ll find everything you’re looking for – everything everyone has been looking for since Adam and Eve escaped their garden prison.

Gentle reminder: Beware of niceness in all forms and by any name. It has no place on this journey. You can wallow in sickly-sweet niceness before and after, but not during. (Look at me, I’m nice as hell.) Beware of anyone promoting niceness in any of its sugary, mind-rotting forms. Beware of anyone telling you that all is well, that you’re fine just the way you are, that the only thing standing between you and awakening is your efforts to awaken; there’s a big part of us that’s very susceptible to this message. Beware of anyone who is soothing and comforting, who promises peace and happiness. Your real friends at this stage will be shaking and slapping you, screaming to penetrate your sleeping mind. In fact, beware of everyone except your Little Bastard Within; he’s the only one you need, and he’s no Mr. Nice-Guy. If he hands you an apple, eat the apple. If he hands you a sword, start swinging it. If he hands you a breath mint, take the hint.

It’s nice to be nice, but niceness will not advance your cause a single step. Nice spiritual teachers sound the death knell of spiritual progress, which is why Maya has sprinkled them so liberally throughout the herd; all the way up to the trailhead parking lot and along the lower trail system. Instead of niceness, watch for a sense of humor; not in the funny sense but in the absurdity sense. No one who takes life seriously stands any chance of awakening in or from the dreamstate, much less assisting others, because they are operating from an eyes-closed perspective. You can’t get here from there.

And speaking of clumsy segues, Apocalypse Now is not about the journey to discover the bloody madman within, but to discover the quiet, contemplative thinker within. Kurtz asks Willard, “I expected someone like you. What did you expect?” Kurtz is in an inquiring state of mind; this is all new to him. He hasn’t arrived; he’s still on a journey of becoming what he is by unbecoming what he’s not. Society made him a soldier, but he has the soul of a poet-warrior. He’s lived his life in a state of severe misalignment which he’s only now managing to correct. He’s not, as Willard might have expected, a blood-soaked lunatic commanding a cult-like army to commit hideous atrocities; he’s a recluse, living in a monastic setting, reading poetry and writing letters. He’s introspective, thoughtful, not a madman at all. Or, maybe he’s the worst kind of madman. Maybe the generals are right to fear their old friend Walt. He hasn’t just gone off the rez or gone native; he’s gone primal. 

Maya’s underlings sent one assassin, now they’re sending another. Willard is tasked with finding Little Bastard Kurtz and terminating his command with extreme prejudice. Why? As Jonathan Swift teaches us, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Maya, the intelligence of fear, cannot abide honest, original thought. Independence of mind and courageousness of spirit must be snuffed out wherever they flare up, even in the darkest heart of the remotest jungle. Kurtz is just a tiny spark at this stage, but that’s how raging wildfires begin, and the dreamstate illusion is built entirely of dry tinder.

The Kurtz that Willard finds in the jungle is not a raving madman; he’s more sage than psycho (not to say you can’t be both). He’s not burning with murderous emotions or seething with hatred, not irrational or hyper-emotional. Instead, he’s calm and soft-spoken, introspective, inquiring. He’s struggling with new and uncomfortable levels of questioning after a lifetime of groupthink, herd conformity and rigid indoctrination. He is, in his own words, a snail crawling along a razor’s edge. 

There’s a pretty wide gulf between the Kurtz that Willard is told about, and the one that Willard finds. Kurtz hasn’t gone totally insane, as his former bosses suggest, he has elevated himself to a new kind of sanity – radical sanity – which is not insane but hyper-sane; lucid. His thoughts are still so juvenile and unformed as to barely qualify as thoughts at all – as anyone’s would be at this colicky, teething stage. He experienced his version of the initial nondual insight, and now he’s processing the aftermath. Though only a head above the herd at this point, he would see a bigger picture in which playing soldier played no part. He’d see the real battle, of which modern warfare is but a shadow. He’s only taken a step or two, but that’s enough to turn him into a new kind of being. He’s not yet established in this new state – still learning to crawl and walk – but he’s growing.

A real Kurtz would have forgotten all about war; would have disappeared into the jungle and never been heard from again. Once you’re out of the herd, you’re out of Maya’s sphere of influence. (Stated less metaphorically, you’ve switched out of the fear-based emotional pole and into the reason-based mental pole of your being.) At this point, Maya’s interest in you is over; you and she can even have a nice relationship now (ahem, platonic). Once you’re out of her herd, you’re out of her hair. She wouldn’t have sent assassins to kill renegade Kurtz if he weren’t still playing in her sandbox. (You’d think Cambodia would be far enough from the things of man, but apparently not.) His mistake was remaining in the theater of war when he should have dropped savagery and barbarism like a hot potato. He remained in military mode when all his efforts should have been directed toward completing his own transformation. 

Who’s the real protagonist in Apocalypse Now? Kurtz is no mere monster, he’s a heretic, which, in the dreamstate, is the most insidious and dangerous kind of monster; the thinking kind that threatens to rock reality and disrupt herd stability. Willard shouldn’t have killed Kurtz, he should have joined him like the first assassin they sent (sell the car, sell the house, sell the kids). Willard was just an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill, but Kurtz kept him close, gave him a chance to break free of his own shackles and rise up to a more elevated perspective. In the end, Willard’s eyes opened just a bit, but too little and too late. 

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free.
Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand,
in a desperate land.

The real crime of Walter Kurtz was the heresy of thinking outside his assigned box; of opening his eyes and looking and seeing for himself. His journey didn’t take him far and his development was shallow, but he was headed in the right direction. If he hadn’t kept fighting the war, they would have declared him MIA and never given him another thought. Instead, he took one or two steps and paused, still playing war while working out his own issues. You can’t serve two masters; split focus is no focus.

Seeing the horror of the world is not a final destination, but a first step on a much longer journey; not just into the heart of darkness, but through and beyond. Kurtz had a diamond-bullet epiphany that turned him from a golden-boy soldier into a jungle warlord. His epiphany was fairly ho-hum, but it was eye-opening, which is what makes the real difference and starts the real journey. He’s not the one who chopped off the inoculated arms of village children, but he saw the perfection of it, the will. (Will plays a big part in all this.) “And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.” That’s not a battlefield-level epiphany, that’s a transition-level epiphany. 

Walter Kurtz had undergone second-stage birth, but was still a toddler himself. He gone through transition, but not significantly beyond. That’s what we see him doing with his reading and contemplating; trying to get a handle on his new situation, trying to think, to process the aftermath of the bomb that went off in his head. Given his powerful heart and mind, who knows what Kurtz might have become in the next decades, but he kept playing war and poking Maya, so he lost his head (and not in the good way).

Kurtz and Willard are a guru-chela pairing like 1984’s O’Brien and Smith, but not as advanced or successful. O’Brien is more fully developed than Kurtz. See where thinking gets you? It doesn’t sound so great when we look at monsters like Kurtz and O’Brien, certainly not very loving and spiritual, but there’s no nice way to destroy your dreamstate universe. The more monstrous the teacher, the greater their hope of success. What are Kurtz and O’Brien but sword-swinging roshis? At the other end of the spiritual teacher spectrum we find all the cuddly little sweetness-and-light furballs with their talk of peace, love, compassion and happiness, and their spotless records of failure. We like our spiritual superiors to be sweet-natured, and we’d rather they didn’t toss a freshly-severed head in our lap or strap a cage of hungry rats to our face, but when you’re making your own up-river journey, you’re venturing into dark territory, and you gotta take it as it comes. “Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you’re going all the way.”

Willard is not the protagonist, he’s just a plot-device; a wind-up toy with a bomb in his head sent by the minions of Maya to get in and go boom, which is exactly what he did. This is Walter Kurtz’s story. It’s not Willard’s river adventure that we see, but Kurtz’s journey through Willard’s eyes. Through Willard, we see Kurtz going from upright and respected officer, through progressive stages of disintegration and dissolution; falling up. Kurtz is the one who undergoes character development from child soldier to adult sage. 

Kurtz, like many adults of early-stage development, should have gotten himself further from the things of man – out of Maya’s reach – and into his own space where he could continue his metamorphosis undisturbed by lower lifeforms and pesky assassins. He left land for sea, but never made it past the rocky, storm-tossed coastline between two worlds, where he was smashed on the rocks; his command terminated before it really began. The secret to success is further – onward and upward – always focused exclusively on the next step. Maya and your Little Bastard are the gods of your personal dreamstate – you can’t worship both.