The Gap Between the Six Worlds and the Seventh, Cont.

There in the swamp, he will with much confusion find himself surrounded by the dead and the dying, the drugged, the drunk and the mad. It may not immediately occur to him that he is or may soon be one of them. He is as yet only a stranger in a strange place.

Three courses of action are open to him:

(1). He may notice the distant signs of sanctuary blinking on the Nirvanic mountain. In many different ways, religions of salvation always advertise their ability to help troubled people. If he is spiritually precocious - and frequently the people we least suspect of having spiritual potential turn out to be the most divinely gifted - he may not take long to size-up his situation. He may quickly sense that happiness cannot consist in the world exterior to himself and that if he is to survive, he can no longer continue to define himself in terms of his relations to other people (the religious equivalent of attempting to divide by zero.) Concerned now for the first time about the safety of his own soul, he may start swimming in the direction of Nirvana's alluvial fan.

(2). He may look back at the Samsaric world and see family, friends, TV pitchmen, and a variety of social workers, all trying to reach down from the Wheel and pull him back aboard. They will assure him that he will find new life if he only gets his teeth capped, buys a sports car, joins a health club, restyles what is left of his hair, invests in penny stocks, or attends the meetings and social gatherings of persons similarly discomfited.

If he accepts their help and tries all the Six Worlds' nostrums for curing despair, it will be only a matter of time before he discovers that blow-dried hair cannot resolve an existential crisis nor a Blaupunkt sound system drown out a spiritual call to arms. Nothing will have changed for the better. He will still feel like an alien... a bewildered and, after several months of these remedies, financially overextended alien. His distress will intensify accordingly and he will return to the swamp in worse condition than when he left it.

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