Pilgrim in the Machine

Dear Team:

Following up the last letter. The idea of rationalization is key--not only towards understanding the current world we live in--along with all its present dangers, but also as the spur that pushed the Harvest pilgrim into his spiritual odyssey. The one all of you have been exposed to--in fearless your translation endeavors.

I have also talked about how the pilgrim's voyage led to insights about the current decline of the materialist west and the possible evolution of a global mind. The writer has chosen an avante-garde style as his vehicle of choice for the transmission of these insights and experiences.

The American cultural revolution which broke out in America during the 1960's was a direct reaction to the rationalization that was suffocating the country. The division of labor that was creating not only huge bureaucracies with increasingly more centralized power in fewer hands, but also creating a division of vision about how these huge bureaucracies were destroying the very enviornment they were feeding off.

I have also discussed how the cyclic swing back to a less materialist world has bred the possible seeds of new kinds of religious wars which are being manipulated by the declining sensate elites of the west.

The writer in the last letter also explained how Kafka and Orwell in their writings reacted to the the rationalization they saw choking the west. Also how these mass bureaucracies with the use of the new media techniques manipulated mass public opinion.

The Beats in the 1950's also revolted against this rationalization, but could find no real spiritual out-let in their wanderings. This is not the case with Harvest of Gems. The wandering pilgrim already had benefited from the first fruits of the Cultural revolution of the 1960's and prepared himself throughout the 1980's to go on a more protected pilgrimage without the need for drugs, booze, and wild sex.

The Harvest pilgrim as a university student had done extensive research into how the rationalization process has created the Cold War by actually visiting the USSR in 1978 and also reflecting on the the Middle East wars he had experienced as an adolescent in 1973 while living in Israel. The wars being a product of both American and Soviet forms of industrial and military rationalization.

The Harvest university student also studied in detail how American elites at the top of the military-industrial pyramid basically held power and rotated their small numbers-- through-out the corridors of the many governments--elected by the American people regardless of which political party was in power.

The University student also saw how rationalization was basically destroying the global enviornment at a rapid clip. These realizations inside the mind of the university student finally triggered his slow march into the inner mandala of his consciousness. The unexpected journey to Tibet in 1984 also helped to accelerate this process.

All this is documented in earlier writing which have not yet been translated: Prince and Geisha, Harvest One and Two. Of course, Harvest Three, Four, Two Short Stories and the Alien are the later artistic documentations of this heroic flight towards inner freedom from the iron cages of western rationalization.

My letters to all of you in the last three years have also been personal attempts to understand this process as I began talking to myself via my letters to all of you.

Thank you for being such an appreciative audience....

Michael