Spiritual plagues are widespread infestations of highly contagious and deadly attitudes. The spiritual analogues of The Black Death and all the other biological plagues have existed at least as far back in time as we have records, and no doubt much further. The major feature of any type of spiritual plague is that the infected seldom recognize their condition but actually identify with and enjoy passing on the disease. It is in the very nature of this category of diseases to replicate through the enthusiastic and willing participation of the infected. Unlike physical diseases, these invisible plagues depend on the host misinterpreting the presence of the parasite as a positive and life-enhancing addition. Their method of replication relies on the inability of their hosts to identify them as diseases at all.

Just as influenza, cholera and cancer have devastated bodies- the diseases of hatred, greed and ignorance have always temporarily devastated souls. Of these two basic types of plagues, the spiritual and the material, by far the greater long-term wreckage in humanity has been produced by the immaterial versions. Spiritual plagues have the effect of severing a human being from the very foundation of sanity, which is basic common sense. As such, they have always constituted the major obstacle to successfully running the human race. And as such, they are ever with us. Yet each generation must contend with new and improved strains of soul sickness, which always hide behind the façade of respectability and which always manage to look outwardly attractive. If the bacilli of a spiritual plague didn t know how to appear extremely desirable to large numbers of people, they wouldn t be able to exist at all. These types of illnesses are utterly dependent on perfect invisibility and the disguise of attractive ordinariness. Because these sicknesses of the spirit blind the hosts so successfully as to be taken for to be normal ways of living, those infected seldom have a chance to heal themselves. Instead, we see the large portions of the population living and dying in complete unawareness of being carriers of deadly mass delusions.

The Black Death riding through the streets always compels the perfect attention of the human species. When large numbers of bodies begin to fester, humanity listens to the message. And in this listening, inner ears may open. The still small voice of higher truth whispers from beyond the realm of meat rotting on the bone. Outbreaks of biological plagues have always offered the prospect of fear-born mass deathbed conversions. All times and places of material devastation inevitably force humans into the ultimate confrontation. Am I spirit, or am I flesh? Under the pressure of catastrophic circumstances, there are always those who reject opportunity, and choose to become more desperately selfish and to worship their own hides. But many others are propelled truthward by calamity. They genuinely rise above their everyday selves, and clearly hear the eternal message of the soul, whose nature is impersonal sacrificial love. When the Skeleton walks the streets, humans are pushed into mass self-revelation, whatever the result may be.

But where so many are so happy and so proud to be carriers of spiritual disease, what can be expected? There are devastating plagues stalking and slaying vast numbers of human beings right now, but they are enthusiastically embraced. For instance, the bacillus of acquisitiveness has infected so many that practically the entire human race is suffering from the outbreak. The cancer called Greed has become institutionalized and sold to human beings with a psychologically appealing designer label: as a kind of unquestioned divine right. An insidious pathological condition called Lifestyle has decimated vast numbers of the population and continues to devour those with poor spiritual immune systems. As a people, we no longer are satisfied to be alive: we desire to have Lifestyles instead.

Living is what we are and do from the inside out; it is what we feel and think and make out of our own being. Lifestyles, on the other hand, are either mass-produced by machines or by people forced to produce repetitively as if they were machines. Living is personal, intimate, and arising naturally out of who we are. Lifestyles are impersonal, factory-made and arising only out of the motive to make a profit. They are artificial and ugly replacements for people too busy and too apathetic to even generate their own existence. Living is a hands-on, heart-on and head-on relation to the world. Lifestyles are imposed from Madison Avenue and have nothing to do with anything but causing victims to fall prey to advertising.

Our civilization has traded the nourishing kernel of genuine living for the witless pursuit of bigger and increasingly complex temporary shells. The machinery of the Bubonic Lifestyle is cutting down all the branches of the Tree of Life and tearing it up by the roots. We are decorating the ugly, heartless, mass-produced substitutes for our own existence with machine-made junk and techno-tinsel, and calling this living. We have forgotten what living even means, and that it is above all an internal subjective affair. We have substituted the meaninglessness of an entire world of factory products, and glossy exteriors, for the meaningful world of well-crafted objects, life made by hand with love, and a full subjective existence. And since we don t collectively see through the facades to the invisible running sores, staring skulls, and wasted souls accompanying such a devastating epidemic, it continues to be highly infectious.

Unregulated Consumption, or the Bubonic Lifestyle, is a disease that has become an epidemic of unprecedented proportions. Instead of fulfilling our destiny as a species of reasoning beings, looking ahead to our personal and collective future, we are becoming a species of blind rabid devourers. The majority of us are being reduced these days to a lifetime of feverish consuming, to no end whatsoever. We are becoming a race of eaters, who can never get enough of anything. We fill our bodies by consuming gross oozing poisonous substances, and we call these disease-ridden waste products Food. We fill our emotional natures with brutalizing inanity, vicious ugliness, 10-cent sex, maudlin sentimentality, and blaring racket, and we call these disease-ridden waste products Entertainment. We fill our minds with hypnotic forms of outright outrageous lies, heavy-handed multinational corporate propaganda, fear-induced commentary on obvious power-struggles for dominance, and flashy meaningless bits of techno-fluff, and we call these disease-ridden waste products News. It is very sad to contemplate that most of this society actually relishes these kinds of physical, emotional and mental boils, buboes, and sickbed ravings.

In such a many-sided attack on human health and sanity, to survive relatively unafflicted is difficult. Egos grow visibly and invisibly obese, in a treadmill of doomed effort to satisfy unregulated appetites of various kinds, while the inner human souls slowly starve to death. A sleek smug glittering crowd of increasingly wealthy revelers, fussily dining in the most absurdly expensive restaurant, and a downtrodden crowd of the increasingly poorer, overweight and undereducated slave classes, heaping junk food in a supermarket cart, are just two halves of one empty whole. Both ends of the economic spectrum generally seek as much obliviousness as possible, and generally find it. That the middle classes, traditionally significant carriers of lively and useful germs of reasonably steady progress, are now joining enthusiastically in the overall death-by-willful-stupification, presages eventual disaster.

We speak of the Haves and the Have Nots. This is the Stuff Gauge of human worth. It s based on the obvious: we all need a certain amount of material well being in order to live at all. The purpose of having a sufficient amount of worldly prosperity is in order to convert this raw material into beautiful and useful actions, feelings, and thoughts. Less than this is less than human. We need a certain amount of basic freedom from want in order to create anything else at all worth having. We need a functioning and reasonably secure material civilization in order to create a human culture. What we have instead is a civilization utterly devoid of all culture and proud of it- indeed, completely unaware by now of even what a culture is. We no longer know the difference between civilization and culture, and we don t care either. And the result of this failure to support even normal levels of human aspiration is the rapid decay of the underpinnings of civilization itself. The flourishing bacilli of raw greedy consumption continues to erode this society, and the eventual result will be an entire nation of Have Nots. But far too few see this inevitable end, and so we go on as we are.

We are hypnotically focused on the Haves and Have Nots, as if that was all there is to human life. Material sufficiency is just the foundation and the beginning. Having is merely the prerequisite to doing. We don t speak much about the Dos and the Do Nothings. In fact, to be able to Do Nothing is considered to be the very pinnacle of worldly rewards. Most people do only what they must, and rarely what they can. They work very hard most of their lives at some activity which requires far less of them than they have to offer, and then, if they are lucky, are rewarded by the Do Nothing prize given at the end, called Retirement . Human activity is accepted as just another commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, which in most cases amounts to a very low estimate of and even less interest in the full range of creative human qualities. What is wanted in the Job Market are mainly various types of cogfolk to drive the machinery that churns out the billions of pieces that go to make up various predigested and predetermined substitutes for living. These in turn serve as fresh bait for the parasite to further transmit the Bubonic Lifestyle. So successful is this parasite that many human beings have no objections whatsoever to being constantly referred to as Consumers . That this word differs not at all in meaning from Mindless Locusts seems to be of no concern whatsoever to those to whom it is applied.

Human beings are innately capable, given half a chance, of doing very wonderful things. Our species, in its very rare healthy state, has a great gift for being inventive, ingenious practical idealists. So far it has been mainly individuals here and there who manifest this capacity, but it is a characteristic of the human race as a whole all the same. As things stand, we are usually unable to employ ourselves in the exercise of our very best capacities even for enlightened self-interest. As for pure altruism, this is a condition we are so heavily inoculated against from birth that few of us ever experience it at all. For most of us, unless the current manipulators of humanity want our specific talents as fodder for the disease-machinery of Consumptive Lifestyles, we are out of luck. There are, of course, happy exceptions to this general catastrophe. Some people find a way through and manage to be themselves, live as themselves, and give their best. There is much to hope for in these demonstrations of individuals managing to overcome Cog World. Because their successes prove that there are many human beings left who are still healthy and hungry for reality beyond the plague of soul-killing world-destroying conspicuous consumption.