newkid

I love America not for what she is, but for what she always can be.

-- Foozler Emeritus Boney McJunkins

Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home!
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby

-- The Beatles, "Golden Slumbers�

The Way Back Home has been closed � under repairs � for many millennia. One became two, and the Road forked into the innumerable sidestreets of consciousness. The egg of the opposites cracked, the happy unity of dreamtime broken by Necessity.

The bad news is that the Road Home is still closed. Eden is a group project. Everybody gets in, or nobody gets in.

That�s the good news, too.

Sucks, doesn�t it?

The purpose of the Western shamanic and philosophical tradition is the re-discovery of the Way Back Home � and the way is indeed �backwards,� in regression to source. As Plato, William Blake, and others discovered, the gates of heaven and hell are one and the same.

When the lock of history is picked, the archangel sheathes his sword. Eden is back in business, Creation whole.

J.R.R. Tolkien was another who knew the Way Back Home, the meeting with the uroboric dragon, by name Smaug or otherwise. What is wanted is a human tumbler, a peacock of a locksmith.

In short: a Burglar. No golden boy from the stars can hack this System. This caper calls for a dead ringer. We need home-grown talent, streetfighters and muckdivers, demon saints, Blessed Burglars of Ur-Baggins proportions.

They've been in the pressure cooker a long time. Throughout history and prehistory, they�ve had many names. Plato called them, collectively, the Philosopher King.

Plato�s record of the Philosopher Kings in the Dialogues comes relatively late, not early as assumed, in the evolution of Western �philosophy� -- meaning the Western occult/mystical tradition deriving from Paleolithic shamanism, not its literary traces in the Classics.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, the dead white male who kickstarted the Western philosophical tradition foresaw the spiritual and ethical demise of the West. Being of sound and generous character, he fashioned a skeleton key with which future generations, under dire need, might crack the safe of history, and of themselves. Hidden in his rhetorical dialogues, Plato left an eschatological bread-trail, an escape hatch from the labyrinth of Empire, a guide to healing the division between political and sacred leadership -- a roadmap Back Home.

The ancients and their Classics are classic for reason. The Renaissance, wisely, found its phoenix in Hellenism and Augustine Rome. The modern West turns to Alice Walker and Rigoberta Menchu. (Pronounced men-chew.)

Dead white male Plato is deemed offensive, incorrect, and useless by the Western Academy � bloated as it is by bullies, ideologues, buttlickers and what once were called �puffers� � phacade �philosophers.� Phakes.

Like alchemy, Plato�s work is full of boobytraps for the puffers -- dialectic dead-ends. Like the alchemists two millennia later, Plato hid the gold within piles of bullshit.

But his gold yet glitters between the lines. Plato is remedy for our Age of Propaganda. As anti-matter is dark, Plato is anti-Spin.

His Dialogues � especially �The Philosopher King� from the Republic � were written not for ancient Greece, but for the tottering Republic and Empire of third millennium America, inheritor of the Greco-Roman tradition, pathfinder of the West, sad lost soul.

Plato�s Republic answers the Sphinx admirably. It�s a codex double-sealed against eschatological Necessity, against its hour of obligation � these trembling, crucial days when the Towers of the West are fallen, the nation following them down.