I sit here in my monk cell with ten zillion million books from all cultures and civilizations and schools of thought and religious persuasions and philosophies (including some R. Crumb) and scientific and mystical theorizing all perused and some intensely studied in my attempt to understand, to comprehend the human condition. Each book is a human consciousness and thought system.

I've hung out with the outlaws and the saints, with the hippies and the farmers, with the police and the merchants, with all races and creeds, with street people and the well-to-do, with gangs of women and with rednecks, with professors and with truck drivers, even with some politicians, all to further my understandings of this peculiar made-in-the-image-of-God creature who keeps returning to his folly like a dog to its vomit (as one of the Books so graphically puts it.)

And what is the outcome of these decades of attempt at comprehension? What is my diagnosis of our species? We are heros and heroines who will give up our own lives with hardly a thought in seeking to save others. We are the most perverted, cruel and ignorant bozos around (and fanatically proud of it). We are stuporous jackaknapes working for the man, slaves of the obscenely rich whom we worship and attempt to emulate with our Walmart copies of their Dior fashions. Each of us has our head firmly encased in our own virtual reality helmet.

We are demons; we are angels; we are suckers; we are fools. We are prophets; we are poets; we are mystics. Each of us is a personality disorder with some form of addiction. We are an experiment gone wrong looking to right itself. We are an experiment going right waist deep in the muck. It's all up to us and we can't do it without some help. We are the universe itself coming to Awareness.

May God (and the gods and goddesses) help us all.