Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sat, 26 Sep 1992 19:53:22 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Re: PERFECT MASTER OF THIS AGE and LORD OF THE UNIVERSE for
              1970-1975

1. Whenever you hear the word Experience, somebody is trying to sell you
something.
2. If it's "an Eperience which cannot be expressed in words," they will never
shut up.
3. On July 6, 1973, I Received the blissful Knowledge of Guru Maharaj Ji from
Mahatma Fakiranand, already notorious for bashing in with a hammer the head of
a reporter from the weekly Detroit Fifth Estate who threw a custard pie in the
face of God. I swore I would never reveal the Techniques, and won't because
there is no good reason why anyone should want to know. The Divine Light is the
cheapest trick in the catalogue of mysticism and Mystic Experiences. The Divine
Music is caused by boredom. The Word, on the other hand, will induce the
Primordial Vibration, but only the In People knew *where* you were supposed to
Experience the Primordial Vibration. My colleague Ralph Larkin worked one of
the heavies, found out it was base of the spine. The rest was a snap. The
Divine Nectar is caused by poor quality supermarket-throw-out food served at
ashrams of the Divine Light Mission.

The appeal of the Divine Light Mission was that it was self-consciously absurd,
nonsensical, and bizarre. This was entirely suitable to its social function,
which was to facilitate the dropping back in of dropouts who'd dropped out in
the 1960s. This was all written up in journal articles excavated from a book
nobody would publish due to the collapse of the Divine Light Mission from God
getting bored and from competition in the person of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, so
parents were afraid *his* outfit, not something that went <poof>, was going to
turn their kids into peapods.

4. Moral: Occurrences of the ubiquity of the bizarre are commonplace in history
and almost without exception yield to reductionist social science analysis; if
only they'd had sociologists following Jesus of Nazareth around with tape
recorders this would be a better world. As the little kiddies down home used to
say, "Roses are red, violets are bluish; if it wasn't for Jesus we all would be
Jewish."

The trouble is, the determinate causes of occurrences of the ubiquity of the
bizarre, formerly called "crazes" or "manias" and include stock market and
other speculation (a favorite case cited by the old-timey sociologists was the
Dutch tulip mania), are of multiple etiology and each one has its own complex
of causes. Sometimes these are superficial; sometimes they do indeed portend
IMPENDING DOOM which, as you know, is one of my favorite things even if it's
scary, like last night when I woke upr with fear fit at 4am. National and
economic news today justified the fear fit, I think.

The bizarre will be found to have been ubiquitous before the French Revolution,
the Russian Revolution, any humungous Thingie like that. [Note: When I was a
kid, Prof. Rose Goldsen, who was a sociologist of the Old School, told me to
*never* use the word *phenomenon* because it was dirty. I never figured out
what to do about *phenomenology*.] But the bizarre will also be found to have
been ubiquitous because things were in general tedious.

Daniel A. Foss