I’d have to agree. In the years I’ve gone, I’ve learned about two particularly fascinating novels out there, the post-apocalyptic, post-literate narrative Riddley Walker and the miraculous Cloud Atlas (soon to be adapted to the screen by Tom Twykler of “Run Lola Run”… that’ll be interesting to see. Said movie will also be produced by the Wachowski Brothers, who reportedly assigned the book as required reading to the cast of “V For Vendetta”). So I almost had to kick myself for not thinking of it myself.

Well, check it out for yourself. In all honesty, there’s some books in here I feel you’re better off avoiding – anything, for instance, with the number “2012″ in it. To be sure, there’s a lot of New Age hokum/magical thinking nonsense mixed with some paranoid libertarian/survivalist manifestos to delve through here, not to mention a lot of mainstream bestsellers that all of us are aware of. And I kinda wished there were a few more obscure discoveries, as many of the titles here will be familiar to most bookreaders. Still, it’s an appropriate cross-section of the playa psyche, and what’s running through it circa 2009. And need I say that you can purchase it all at the Bookloft, your friendly online independent bookstore?

Well, too bad. I said it anyway.

So here you go:

-Neuromancer by William Gibson
-The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
-Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
-T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia New Autonomy Series) by Hakim Bey
-The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis
-Kes by Lawrence Till and Barry Hines
-She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir
-The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts
-Conversations with God : An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1) by Neale Donald Walsch (This link is to a newer edition, entitled “The New Revelations)”
-Feel the Fear . . . and Do It Anyway (r) by Susan Jeffers
-Any book by Andrew Weil M.D.
-The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius Of The Golden Age by Christopher Hibbert
-Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
-The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapille
-Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz
-A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
-Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda
-The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence by Deepak Chopra
-Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy by Joel Kotkin
-Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
-2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck
-The Phantom Toolbooth by Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer
-The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
-The Secret of Light by Walter Russell
-Myths To Live By by Joseph Campbell
-The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
-THE BIG BOOK OF JOKES & RIDDLES by kidsbooks
-The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
-Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
-Any title by William Gibson
-Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer
-Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, -Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness by Daniel G. Amen
-My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor
-Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin
-1776 by David McCullough
-The Monster Who Ate Stars by Souther Salazar (out of print)
-A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
-Illusions by Richard Bach
-Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
-Mahabharata: The Greatest Spiritual Epic of All Time by Krishna Dharma
-Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose
-Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day
-The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World by Lynne McTaggart
-The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby
-Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna
-Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts
-The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
-The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
-Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl
-Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles
-The World According to Garp by John Irving
-The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel by John Nichols
-Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
-Lord of the Flies by William Golding
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
-The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Patricia Reilly Giff
-The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
-The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
-The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
-A Friend of The Earth by T.C. Boyle
-Drop City by T.C. Boyle
-The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq and Gavin Bowd
-Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
-Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
-Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
-Any Title by Charles Bukowski
-The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
-The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
-His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and Nicholas Wright
-A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
-The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
-The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
-Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
-Lust for Life by Irving Stone
-You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
-The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
-I, Monty by Marcus Bach
-A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
-The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
-The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
-Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
-Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese
-The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins
-Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

Oh, and while I’m at it, here’s two I figured to throw in, to serve as a palliative to all the sweetness and light on the list:
-Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews
-Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

In the meantime, I managed to check out the exhibit of the Book itself that’s being held at the Rubin Museum Of Art in New York City. It’s still there, in case you happen to be in the area, and you can also check out their lovely permanent collection of Himalayan Buddhist art while you’re at it. Here’s a few photos of the exhibition I managed to sneak in while I was at it.

Yes, it's an awfully big book

early versions of mandalas eventually used with the Red Book

A labrynthine mandala within the Red Book

Okay, not too many of you. And yes, it’s indeed sad to see how soon you all forget. Good thing we’ve got Mitch Horowitz to remind us, then, especially as esoteric potboilers like The Lost Symbol and New Thought retreads like The Secret continue to command the attention of this nation’s unaware. Alerted to this book’s presence by Horowitz’s guest-blogger stint on Boing Boing, I knew I needed to give mention of this book somehow. And of course, I’d also have to check out his two-day appearance at LA’s Philosophical Research Institute. So off I went.

Mitch Horowitz at PRS

Indeed, Horowitz is an erudite and fluid public speaker on his subject matter, and a real class act to boot. And wouldn’t you know it, but he actually possesses a second home not 20 minutes away from Eric Wilska himself, so he’s quite familiar with the Bookloft. I’m not surprised, as much of his talk on Saturday focused on a portion of upstate New York known as the “Burned-Over District” in the 19th Century, so named because of the stunning emergence of impassioned, homegrown religious sects in the area at that time.

In his talks as well as in his new book, Occult America: The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, Horowitz underlines what he feels is American Occultism’s paramount contribution to mainstream American society: that religion “should have a practical application to daily life.” He bears this out mainly by pointing to the self-help/Positive Thinking industry most recently exemplified by The Secret and excoriated by Barbara Ehrenreich. Much of this ground had already been covered recently by The Secret Source, co-written, incidentally, by PRS librarian Maja D’aoust. But here, it’s placed within a wider context

The most insightful moments of the book for me come with the chapter-long explorations on the life of PRS founder Manly Hall and the famed “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, whose legacy and personal contradictions are examined with an admirable sensitivity. Throughout the book, Horowitz strikes a difficult balance between the beliefs of his subjects and the demands of scholarship. For while he’s made a name for himself in the New Age market by editing books by authors like Jacob Needleman and Daniel Pinchbeck, Horowitz wisely eschews that movement’s easy cliches.

It’s been noted online that Horowitz’s survey is hardly comprehensive, focusing as it does on the 19th and 20th century and brushing aside developments such as the Army’s investigation into remote viewing and the abandoned First Earth Battalion project with a single sentence. (Granted, the film and movie The Men Who Stare At Goats explores this in greater detail, but I’d prefer a writer like Horowitz to take a slightly less condescending crack at it.) And I personally feel that the seduction/PUA phenomenon detailed in books like The Game (written by a former colleague and college friend of mine as it turns out… more on this in another post.) can be tied to some of the innovations Horowitz details. Still, I’d recommend this for Horowitz’s voice. As I said before, the guy is truly a class act, one who gives each side equal time, and serves as a perfect model for how proponents of idiosyncratic belief can interface with the skepticism and rigor serious scholarship requires. I hope this won’t be the last we hear from him outside of the specialized publications Horowitz usually writes for.

Proceedings to Thee Ritual...

As busy as I am preparing for Burning Man this week, there was virtually no way I could miss the Process Church Of The Final Judgment presentation hosted by Feral House and Cinefamily last night at the Silent Movie Film Theater in Los Angeles. I had heard about The Process Church Of The Final Judgment many years ago thanks to Adam Parfrey’s landmark collection of fringe culture essays “Apocalypse Culture” (and thanks, Ero, for gifting the book to me many years ago.) and figured I had heard as much as I needed to know about this unique mixture of gnostic Christianity and Scientology-derived psychoanalytics. But Adam’s wife Jodi has done wonders for Feral House, prompting a host of events nationwide that place the books in a wider context, with this one being a solid case in point. And all that was being asked of me was to lay my life down for both Jesus Christ and Satan. No real biggie.

I’m guessing, however, some of you will NOT be familiar with the Process. Brief introduction: the Process Church Of The Final Judgment was a psychoanalytical project, inspired partly by Scientology, which blossomed into a full-on Gnostic Christian cult in the ‘60s. Founded by architectural student Robert De Grimston and former prostitute Mary Anne MacLean, the cult gained infamy for its worship of Lucifer, Jehovah, Christ and Satan, as well as an apparently tenous connection to Charles Manson. Ed Sanders and Terry Maury made hay of this in their respective books The Family and The Ultimate Evil. To be sure, the Church did get around – the Church’s magazine was a pretty interesting read in its day, featuring an interview with Mick Jagger and excerpted twice by Funkadelic in its liner notes for Maggot Brain and “America Eats Its Young.” The church folded in 1974, committing whatever Satanic bloodshed has occurred by its agency since then strictly on the DL.

It’s only now that Adam’s finally gotten around to publishing a fuller account of the Process Church’s history, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story Of The Process Church Of The Final Judgment, written by founding member Timothy Wyllie. To celebrate, Feral House teamed up with local cult film promoters Cinefamily to throw a full-on mass, similar to the ones the Church once threw in the ‘60s to attract members. And let me tell you that seeing the Baphomet head onstage was all the license I needed to order this big huge scrumptious cookie dough cupcake from the goodie stand before I took my seat. I had permission to sin, you see.

The stage is set

Directly in front of me, eerily enough, were two fashion designers I had seen just a few hours ago at a decidedly more New Agey setting. One of them had completed work on a film with Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre and Cevin Key, and had been hipped into the church between these industrial music touchstones. At one point, Adam’s business and life partner, Jodi Wille, comes up to me and asks me a favor: apparently, this service requires a little audience participation. It’s all in the booklet we received as we came in. And she also asks when the call for initiates to the church is uttered to please stand and encourage the hipsters assembled to do their part.

Neither of my newfound pals in front of me sound down for this – they’re obviously former Goths who would rather worship a critical remove rather than Jesus and Satan. For my part, I recall the immortal South Park “dance-off” episode where the Goth joins Stan’s dance team, declaring, “I’m so non-conformist that I’m not gonna conform with you,” and pledge silently to do my part.

The show begins with four cowled musicians solemnly taking their place on the stage. This combo, which included a few crack players from the metal, indie rock and New Weird America scenes (namely David Christian of No-Neck Blues Band, Dark Metal vocalist Jex Thoth, Kevin Rutmanis and Imaad Wasif), really cooked, let me tell you; they belted out heartfelt pledges of love and allegiance to demons and angels with the conviction of true believers. I’m thinking back right now to the longing in Jex’s voice for a time many of us in the audience never knew. Later on in his talk, author Wyllie clearly attributes occasionally cynical motivations to the church, but clearly, none of this was on display during the Sabbath Assembly.

The Temple Band (l-r): Kevin Rutmanis, Jex Thoth, Imaad Wasif

One note: a LOT of references to God in such an assembly. One couple behind me was totally creeped out by it, apparently looking at the whole proceeding as a massive Kool-Aid chug-a-lug. I for one sincerely hope they didn’t injure their asses on the doorknob upon their hasty retreat. That said, there were quite a few new “initiates” to the fold when the Sacrifist, a middle-aged gent in a fetching red robe, made his call, and none of them became any less cool in my eyes.

Under a watchful eye

After the Assembly portion, Maja D’aoust, the fetching chief librarian over at the Philosophical Research Society and author of The Secret Source, stepped out of her liturgical skin to explain what we had just seen. The Church often presented something similar to what we had seen to new recruits, and offered membership to interested attendees. “If nothing else, understand that the church gave us permission to access the Satan within, and lead him by the hand, instead of the other way around,” she noted.

After a brief yet snazzy peek into an upcoming Process Church documentary, Wyllie, a cartoonish Brit with a towering mane of white hair, struggled in vain with modern technology to show off a few slides before throwing up his hands. He clearly has no problem alerting us to his frequent moments of utter consternation or befuddlement to the task at hand, but somehow makes these moment into quite entertaining. Parfrey then joins him for a brief Q&A, where they talked about the Process’s unlikely morphing into the decidedly secular Best Friends Animal Shelter in Utah and its attendant reality TV series “Dogtown” on National Geographic. With goofy candor, Wyllie admits it derived not just from church doctrine (the group embraced animal rights and anti-vivisectionism early on), but from the continual need to make money. “Of course, we learned eventually that people will give you money without offering ANYTHING!” he observed gleefully. Clearly, and thankfully, this man simply cannot censor himself. Amen.

Feral House Publisher Adam Parfrey (right) speaks with Wyllie

I managed to get a question in as well, about the group’s early ties with Scientology. Wyllie appears to agree with some of Scientology’s basic tools, but notes the Process never steered its adherents towards a preconceived conception of cognitive and spiritual liberation. Since Scientology has a long and checkered history of punishing its apostates, the Process were continually dogged by the Church, who according to Wyllie attempted to pin the Manson murders on their camp (of course, Manson also took Scientology courses in prison prior to the murders, but that doesn’t count, I think.). Wyllie staunchly denies this, but regretfully recalls making a connection with him in the form of a jailhouse interview for the church’s Death issue. “We figured Manson might know a thing or two about that subject,” Wyllie figured.

What little Wyllie shared about the church revealed a small band of Brits following without much of a roadmap a small psychological intuition into unusual territory, with the greatest unintended consequence being the continued interest of its teachings amongst people like us. Wyllie feels this naivete may have been the group’s saving grace, for with more knowledge of the occult, the group may have become actually dangerous. However, talking it over with Maja after the performance, I confessed real sorrow that religious ideas like the Process don’t exist nowadays, and communal, spirtual experiences are considered the sole province of Christian megachurches. No wonder Jex sang so passionately; one can’t help but hope for a day when the counterculture can reclaim a spiritual momentum. For now, at least we have a better idea of what to avoid, and what to aspire to:

Out of the flames of the world
From the heart of the burning inferno
From the ashes of the all-consuming fire
Arises the phoenix from the earth
Comes forth the power of love
Unconquered, unconsumed
Reborn in the fires of the End

And the evil absorbed
And love is restored
And the poison is consumed
And the phoenix is reborn

All is returned
Restored to G-d
Restored to the One
All is returned
All is One

-Hymn, “And the Phoenix Is Reborn”

Oh, and I’m adding a link to Maja’s new podcast, which she’s doing alongside Wired Contributing Editor and fellow Burner Erik Davis. One of these days, I’ll be interviewing him for this blog, but for now, I figured to give him some love.