interview

WIE: Road Scholar was our point of entry into your world, and one of the things that struck us as we watched it was that it had quite a strong spiritual emphasis. Was it your intention from the beginning to interview so many spiritual practitioners of one kind or another, or did it just happen that way as the project unfolded?

Andrei Codrescu: No, we certainly planned it that way. There were two things that interested me when I started elaborating the idea of the film. One was, what is the state of communal experiments after the fall of the big communal experiment in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Some of the early American utopian communities were used by Marx and Engels to elaborate their theory of communism, and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union took that as far as they did by transforming these utopias, in the process, into something that didn't resemble the original versions at all. But some of these communities are still here, and I wanted to know why. And the other thought I had was that I wanted to revisit some of my past. In the past—the late sixties to mid-seventies—I knew quite a few people who were interested in spiritual life and I was close enough to them to witness and occasionally to participate.

WIE: How do you see the state of spiritual life in America today?

AC: I feel that the sixties were the fountainhead of everything bad and good in America today, but as far as the proliferation of various kinds of techniques for attaining enlightenment, I think that that has been largely a function of the market. The great discovery of the early seventies was that the great new markets are interior—they're inward, they're spiritual—and that that was the direction that we were going to go in because we had pretty much exhausted physical space in America. And entrepreneurs of the spirit, if you like, took the cue from there.

WIE: Santa Fe comes across in the film as the quintessential New Age Mecca.

AC: Yes, Santa Fe is clearly the film's locus of what's being marketed, and if you've read the book you know that I met many more people there than were shown in the movie. I found most of them to be charming frauds. Just about everybody seemed to be operating on the surface level of suggestion and gimmickry—crystals, aura healing, etcetera. And then there were the out-and-out psychotics. . . .

WIE: Why do you think that this country has been unable to sustain the kind of radical self-inquiry that was embraced in the sixties? In the nineties, spiritual interest seems to be no less widespread but it doesn't seem to be propelled by the same degree of selfless passion and willingness to risk everything. You were nineteen when you came here in 1966. What is your former nineteen-year-old émigré's perspective on what happened in the sixties and what's happened since?

AC: The sixties was one of those epochs like the twenties—the twenties into the thirties—that suddenly compelled everyone to an urgency that was quite miraculous. These sorts of evolutionary periods occur, but I can't claim to understand why they happen. All I know is that there are tremendous energies loose in the collective body that are competing, and in the twenties and thirties, most of the important thinking in philosophy, in psychology, in ethnography, in history, in geology, was being done. You had, in France, the surrealist writers, Jacques Lacan in psychology . . . quite a few people working in various areas. And what they were competing with at that time was fascism, which was an extremely strong and simplified recipe for suicide. So you could say that this tremendous explosion of creative activity was a rush to find out what human beings were before they were going to be killed. I think that in the sixties we had the same feeling. It was another end of history—there have been several ends of history that have occurred since Nietszche proclaimed the death of God—and we experienced the same kind of urgency. We wanted to put human life on a new basis. We wanted to find out whether it was possible to live without war, to live in a different way. And that impulse translated itself into an emergency, a psychic emergency. But a very strong wave of oppression soon followed the optimistic explosion of the sixties, and what happened as a result was the translation of the spiritual quest into the realm of politics. Because while of course the FBI and the other oppressive institutions of the government couldn't understand the spiritual quest, they did understand politics, and once things were translated into politics it became easier for them to suppress it.

So for a while America had been nineteen years old just like I was, but now it began to age very quickly. This was partly because the war had disappeared, so there was a different status quo, and partly because we were suddenly introduced to several alternative realities, really that started with Ronald Reagan, who was an absolutely brilliant hologram, a projection of several authoritarian desires in the body politic. What he presented us with was a renewed sense of nationalism, the promise of a shining economy in which everybody could participate so that they could have whatever they wanted, not by trying to change the way they lived but simply by buying it. That was really the beginning of the triumph of consumer society in a very, very big way. And as people got older, pretty soon they began to worry about making a living and then the urgency left. A more radical way to think of it is that the last train for God left America in about 1974. There was a great rush to get on board and many people did—they either died or were marginalized to some place where they still exist. But the rest of us stayed behind and tried to organize life as best we could.

WIE: Georg Feuerstein, elsewhere in this issue, distinguishes between authentic liberation teachings and "watered-down versions of powerful original teachings made palatable to Western consumers." What aspects of our culture would predispose spiritual seekers to accept these diluted teachings? And what is it that has to be removed from genuine teachings in order to make them attractive to Americans?

AC: Our consumer culture is both material and spiritual, and the success of consumerism and spectacle has to do with packaging. You could say that more than two-thirds of the things that make us happy do so because of the package they come in, the box. There's nothing inside. Our attention span has been severely reduced over the past two or three decades. Some people blame television, and it's probably true. But Attention Deficit Disorder is not an entirely negative condition. We also have ADD, or a reduced attention span, because we want to absorb and incorporate more and more information and more and more products in order to make sense of our world. It is only an ascetic minority that tries to do without things, without technologies, without consumption, but even they are inextricably linked to these things. Even those people who consciously refuse to participate are still connected to the global culture, so in a sense there is no choice but to be within it and to think it. So our short attention span comes from an effort to defend our humanity and also our sense of self from a culture that splits it all the time, that divides it, divides it, divides it. Because capitalism is schizophrenia; it is a multiple-personality-producing force. In order to defend yourself against that you have to absorb very fast more and more, and so you don't pay enough attention.

But there is another aspect to your question about making a spiritual package that is pleasing or saleable. Historically, as we all know, true shamans and spiritual people have been shunned by most communities. They have been ostracized. The shamans had to live in a tree and they were dirty and frightful people, and when they came to the edge of the village, it was only the fact that they had spiritual and healing powers that kept the people from beating them with sticks and destroying them. And it seems to me that the shaman's perspective is the one from which to question the genuineness of any spiritual package that doesn't transform you into a complete freak who has to eat worms and live in the desert, that allows you to still live in your community and not be an outcast. Because a palatable spiritual package, to me, runs the danger of not having enough energy or of not being spiritual enough—an effect of being pretty much just a dilettante's dabbling in superstition. I really think that the genuinely spiritual person is dangerous, and charged with a kind of frightful energy and antisocial power. And when they appear, they will be shunned.

WIE: How do you feel, then, about people who are trying to make spiritual teachings popular by "defanging," to use your words, or "denaturing" them by removing the offensive or subversive elements you've touched on so that people will become interested in them?

AC: Those people are dangerous, actually. They're dangerous because they present a virtual reality in lieu of reality. Anybody who gives you a wax apple and tells you it's a real one, you know, you'll figure it out when you take your first bite. But for a while there, after you've bothered keeping it and you're not really eating it, they think you won't know the difference. And a lot of people don't.

The greatest enemy of the real is the seemingly real. And that is something we've gotten very good at doing—faking reality, faking the objects of our interest, presenting substitutes. This is a culture of simulation. It is possible for a poor person to think they are living as well as a rich person because what they buy looks the same, but theirs is made out of cheap s— while the rich people buy the stuff that's made out of genuine material.

WIE: It also seems possible that you might not figure it out. You could actually give yourself the illusion of eating, and even digesting, the wax apple.

AC: Yes, and that's apparently what's happening. There are quite a few people nowadays who are content with consuming substitutes and thinking they're having a genuine experience. And this is a process that's been going on for quite some time. I mean, there are people who know television families better than they know their own. The people sitting next to them on the couch are islands of mystery, while the people on television—the Huxtables, for example—everything is known about them. But the terms by which people relate to the mysteries sitting right next to them are those that are given by the fake, by the simulation, because the simulation provides a language, a way out of the difficulty of the real relationship. It's not so much that people mistake the simulation for the real, as that the simulation provides them with a way out of the difficulty of facing the real. It provides them with an escape.