True Stories of the Philosophical Theater

Book excerpt: An eighteen year old chameleon abandons academic philosophy and a small town for New York City in 1981, and for two years is immersed in bohemian life while working in a bar on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Moving on to other jobs and peculiar relationships, his mind becomes perceptually clogged, and so he haphazardly pursues madness in an attempt to experience life “Apparelled in celestial light” once again. The experiment is a destructive success, and he’s tossed through several historical calamities while quickly learning the mad breakthrough was only a beginning. Embracing world philosophy and religion, he travels alone to India for six months, but it ends up a sixteen year migratory journey through nine countries, the latter thirteen years exiled in Asia, an exile filled with danger, love, farcical mishaps, and a passion for goodness, wisdom, and genuine identity. The story concludes one year after his scrappy return (but not alone) to America. Fourteen years later, the narrative jumps to a postscript. Many stories have been told of self-discovery and coming of age in the sixties, and rightly so. But this contemporary nonfiction novel, a novel as much about people and places as ideas, follows the path of a child of those days into the eighties and beyond. Encountering many renowned radical teachers, great spiritual masters, and anonymous holy people, he concludes that all received doctrines and illusive social fads are inadequate fragments for living a life of truth. Deftly assembling the pieces of a fragmented time, a fragmented soul, and fragmented popular beliefs, Philosophical Theater is both an antidote and homage to our era. Five books complete in one volume.