Having spent my
formative years travelling and exploring the liminal, I was a stranger
to religion. My parents, like most WW2 survivors, were pretty messed
up. Although it's clear that they were each raised in their own
strict environment of ethics, any values it might have had were
clearly damaged by the horrors they experienced. Just the same, my
aspirations didn't have a hope in hell for all the contention and
criticism. In fact, it seems most of my generation in Europe, had
much the same opposition to deal with. It's like the war never ended,
but simply took on ever more subliminal forms of persecution,
expecting us to conform to an industrial complex that caused the
whole problem in the first place. “You have no idea what it's like”
was the usual diminutive, denying any pending problems that did not
fit their war-addled definitions of a worst case scenario. Some
called it the “Generation Gap”, but the fact is they were just
too demoralized to ever get over it. PTSD was unheard of in those
days. No surprise that we took the only course of action under such
miserable circumstances, namely revolt. Hence the so-called 60s
“counter-culture” brought on by the Beatles and other young
artists.
However, I was not so much a
Beatles fan, rather, living so close to Holland at the time, I had
the underground music scene completely at my disposal. Whatever was
too unorthodox for the popular media was more my element- but it was
not as if I was looking for role models, rather, exploring the great
experiment called life. All that mind numbing double-morality being preached at us by our peers, simply lost all meaning in the face of
mutually assured destruction...and despite all delineations between
that perpetual us and them, the enemy of our enemy was not
necessarily our friend. Unfortunately, my family's stateless legacy
had me stuck in the cold war grey zone. Hence, my spiritual journey
was not in quest of nirvana, rather, the long hard road to civil
liberty without someone breathing down my neck. In that regard I was
never a believer in divine intervention. Yet the more I tried to
distance myself, the more I became a person of interest, especially
for my ability to read between the lies. Of course I didn't buy
into all that new age jive, albeit the paranormal, esoteric or
ancient aliens for that matter. It only creeped me out to see how
many fell folly to that euphoria of mystique. A new secret weapon of
mass mind control by the wanton puppet masters of the no-zone. They
wanted in so badly they virtually landed into their own foul trap and
it was without fear or remorse I gleefully burned all those bridges
behind me. What were they expecting from a hedonistic infidel like me
anyway?
