"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

own dreams.

Amanda detested the very concept of the supernatural, the notion that there was a level of reality
discontinuous from the natural realm. It was precisely this kind of superstitious drivel that had perverted
the metaphysical insights of the Vedas into a ludicrous pantheon of petty godlings, turned the purity of the
Buddha's original vision into a series of magical formulas, and in general gave mystical experience an
intellectual bad name.

The supernatural was a contradiction in terms. What is, isreal . And what is real, isnatural. All belief
systemsтАФastrology, Tarot, free market economics, or the Roman Catholic ChurchтАФwere obstacles on
the path to experiential enlightenment.

Of coursescience was just another belief system conning itself into believing that it knew what was real
and what was not, and scientists another priesthood holding onto the franchise of their own particular
brand of Ultimate Reality.

And Amanda had experienced far more than is dreamt of in their natural philosophies. Not supernatural
experiences, buttranscendent experiences, moments when maya's veils part long enough to reveal the
formless clarity at the core of all being, the chaotic unity at the heart of the world.

What is, is real.

Like so many others, Amanda had touched that transcendent reality via acid and mescaline and some
pretty nasty synthetics as a young teenage runaway during the Summer of Love, had followed the Pied
Piper into the Magic Mountain for a season.

Like so many others, she had been unable to return to ground zero in command of the visionary powers
sampled therein, and neither she nor her generation of Flower Children had become the BoddhisatTVas
of their ardent ideals, had returned from their journeys as Lightbringers to joyously transform the world.

But unlike so many others, Amanda Dunston's parents had not seen it as their duty to stuff the genie
back into the bottle upon her return from San Francisco, had not sternly sought to convince her that life
was real and boredom was earnest, had not treated the tales of her psychedelic adventures as the
demented ravings of a drug-crazed teenage hippie, to be expunged from her reality track by
psychotherapy or worse if necessary.

Instead, they had listened to her babbling tales of telepathic communion at group-grope orgies, of
ego-death on acid at the Fillmore, of transcendent orgasm on mescaline, of annihilation of the I-Thou
interface, and all the rest of it, with an interest, which, if not entirely uncritical, was not ashamed to admit
to a certain longing, envy even.
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They had discussed it all with her at endless length, sometimes with a joint being passed. They had
suggested certain readings, introduced her to mandalic art and mantric music, subsidized a retreat at a
Zen monastery, bought her biofeedback equipment, and in general, rather than dismiss her experience
and that of her generation as aberrant lunacy, had gently persuaded her that she had, after all, been very
young, and that what she had supposed was ultimate Enlightenment had only been her first steps upon the