WIE: The subtitle of your book The Disappearance of the Outside is "A Manifesto for Escape," but this is obviously not the kind of escape you mean. What do you see as a viable way out of the perils of life in a culture of ever accelerating simulation?

AC: I personally feel that there is an imperative to create, to make the world, which forces one to original expression and to the rejection of received ideas in any form, especially received language. But we have a great language problem these days because large areas of language have been laid waste by the media, by repetition of clichés, things that used to be meaningful but that mean absolutely nothing now because they've been said so many times, just like kids repeating words over and over until they don't mean anything any more. Some of those words once referred to important things, but now we have instead the continual creation of meaningless buzzwords in the New Age scene, giving us the mind numbing clichés by which most people live their lives today because they no longer know how to articulate their own experience. So under the circumstances it is better, I think, to use two or three notions or expressions that have been deeply examined and are lucid and candid than just to repeat after someone else. And this brings us to the question of ritual.

The fact is that all communities, in order to bond, need certain myths and rituals. By performing a ritual, you are in fact linked to the original act of creation of the community, you're linked to the original myth. So perhaps the important thing, especially today, is not to have a new form or new forms of expression, but to have rituals that are imbued with real meaning, myths that do indeed connect you to an original experience. And I think that would be the job of any truly spiritual community—to continually refresh through ritual the energy, the creative energy of the beginning, and then to continue from there. But things like running around with wolves in the woods or beating drums with Robert Bly don't seem to me to be genuine rituals in that way. They are just more entertainment's of the bored and affluent, who buy themselves a weekend of so-called spirituality and think they've done something. This kind of thing is really humorous. It's what the Czech novelist Milan Kinder defines as "kitsch." Kitsch is the awe that somebody feels about their own amazing good taste and ability to appreciate something. In other words, they're not truly living the experience or appreciating it; they're amazed at how amazing they themselves are for being able to do it.

WIE: In The Disappearance of the Outside you write, "If we face a new situation today, it is the speed with which everything is copied, co-opted and turned against itself. The original of anything, whether it be a poem or an assassination, still preserves something of the freshness of the intent. No such freshness will be found in the copy, and the copy of the copy will have long since turned its energy against the very freshness that spawned its ancestor." Does it seem likely to you that contemporary American versions of ancient spiritual teachings have fallen prey to the same process?

AC: They probably have.

WIE: Why do you think it is that spiritually inclined individuals often don't seem to take the time to deeply examine a prospective path in order to discover how authentic or transformative it really is?

AC: I think the reason why someone who is spiritually inclined may not look closely enough is probably a cultural problem: there are so many alternatives. It's like being in a supermarket. Do you really have time, in a spiritual supermarket, to look at every single thing and read the package and then follow someone? Or do you take for granted the written words and the testimonies of various people?

But I also think that in the sixties we were more adventurous and we really wanted to be "Outside." We threw ourselves Outside and there we encountered the wilderness and in that wilderness we discovered many, many things. We thought that the established churches and institutions at that time were part of the status quo and we wanted to have nothing to do with them. So we experimented, but I think that these experiments have been brought "inside" now. What I refer to as "the Outside" is a place that is now very rarely accessible.

WIE: Our capitalist culture is also a democracy, and one of the central and seemingly democratic injunctions in contemporary American spirituality is "Thou shalt not judge." Many people seem to feel that having a strong opinion in and of itself can cut you off from the experience of a deeper, more intuitive truth. Or alternatively, that all human experience is subjective anyway and there really isn't any deeper truth to speak of.

AC: Well, I think "Thou shalt not judge" is one of those wimpy, fearful, courage-free ideas. The potential of a human being is in commenting, translating, judging the world. Not only should you not shy away from judging, you should do so as much as possible—as long, of course, as you're not harming someone else by doing that. You see, it is not necessarily important to walk a mile in another person's shoes to know that that person is out to lunch or that their shoes don't fit. It's possible to know those things without actually having to do that. So I think that an unwillingness to judge only reflects a lack of courage and it's the disease of a politically correct culture that is afraid to offend. I think you should critique as much as you are able to observe, and not shy away from it. In a true democracy, you'll get equally strong opinions coming back at you, and you have to survive the clash. It's your prerogative as a free person to spout off and even make an ass of yourself if you like, but you'll get your corrective if somebody equally free is also speaking. And it's not that we should be intentionally offensive to one another; we should be candid. The genuineness of democratic discourse is in candor. It's not in avoiding offense.

WIE: How do you think candor fares against the equally popular notion that there is no such thing as objective truth to begin with? If this is true, what is it that makes it possible to discriminate in a way that isn't merely context-bound or subjective?

AC: It's possible to discriminate if you bring to it everything you know. Of course you may not know enough. You may be wrong. But you are duty-bound to be candid. And as I said before, in a true democracy, you will get your comeuppance if indeed you are wrong.

WIE: New Age spokesman Dr. Deepak Chopra delivered an address last May to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., before an assembled multitude of print and broadcast journalists, which was simultaneously broadcast live via national radio and television to an audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. His popularity suggests to some people the possibility of reaching a critical mass of spiritual interest that could propel us toward an exciting new chapter in humanity's collective evolution. What do you think about this?

AC: I may be wrong because I don't know much about him, but I sort of associate Deepak Chopra with a whole slew of somewhat spiritual inspirational speakers that all the corporations in America are now very interested in because they single-handedly inspire bored workers and management to renewed energy which, of course, they will then put into the company. I'm not sure what that's all about, but I am sure that a large corporation doesn't hire a spiritual person in order to sabotage or create anarchy among its operations. They just sort of take a refresher course in, you know, getting in touch with what makes them happier so that they can be better workers. I've heard a couple of these guys but I had to walk out—I just couldn't take it. I think there's a degree of subversion, as we were saying before, to the true spiritual business and it's probably not one that would sit well with corporate management. I know people who teach Zen and juggling to workers and to corporate CEO types who have everything. They have Jaguars and swimming pools. The only thing they don't have—that they're now buying—is the spiritual dimension, if you like, to make themselves more effective.

WIE: Speaking of Jaguars and swimming pools, near the end of Road Scholar you say that "paradoxically, America is the most materialistic country on earth, and it's also the most spiritual." Of course there are many spiritual creeds these days that hold that spirituality and materialism need not be mutually exclusive, and some are even based on that idea. With that in mind, why do you feel this is a paradox? If it is, what is the effect of American materialism on American spirituality? And also, under ideal circumstances, what would be the effect of American spirituality on American materialism?

AC: That's a very good question. I think it is a paradox because the material world that we live in has its own imperatives and its own directions, and for the most part we are flotsam in the constant movement of production and consumption and we really don't have that much to say about it. Now, I think you can look at a lot of spiritual work as a work of resistance to our material culture, and that's where the paradox is. The fact that this country is rich in spiritual movements and ideas testifies, I think, to a certain resistance to being helpless flotsam in the production/consumption cycle. What influence material culture has on this spiritual work we've already discussed: it creates the necessity to package spiritual work, and really to package it in a way that resembles material products, because it's more palatable, it's easier to sell and it's more attractive. But what influence the spiritual work has on material culture is a more complicated question because, clearly, as we've been saying about inspirational speakers and people who introduce spiritual terms into corporate culture, there is some kind of influence, but I don't think it goes to fundamentally changing the nature of the production machine. Genuine spiritual work, I think, would tend to gum up the works. In that sense I don't think there is a great deal of visible influence by true spirituality on our material culture.