>>6560828
I had a dream, when I was a young boy,
That filled me with unfathomable joy.
A place of loving peaceโฆ how to explain?
For years, in dreams, I searched for it again!
How I came to be there I can't say;
Nor how it felt so good, and so far away.
It seemed that I was cradled lovingly
By beings I could sense but couldn't see;
Then I was someplace elseโ somehow aloft
Among shapes gigantic, colorful and soft;
And further up I climbed, or moved, it seemedโ
Up through this magic feeling that I dreamedโ
And then, laid out before me, saw displayed
Tablets or discs, by which facts were conveyed.
As I recall, that ended my ascent;
No one was there to tell me what it meant.
This dream I dreamed when I was much too young
To have studied Buddhism, or Jung,
Or learned to harbor 'new age' expectations
About the sleeping soul's peregrinations.
And yet this dream amazed me with a sense
Of flying in a higher innocence.
And lingered in memory's inner den
Until it rose up before me again:
Which happened in an unexpected way
While reading what an author had to say,
Years later, in a book picked up by chanceโ
This book described my whole experience!
'The Rose of the World' is the book's name
And what it offered set my heart aflame.
Not just reflecting the dream of my youth,
But in many striking claims that ring with truth.
The book was written at the cold war's height
Where the iron curtain blocked all light,
By a famous Russian writer's son.
The father, born in 1871,
Was Leonid Andreev, who we know
As a Russian Edgar Allen Poe.
Daniel, the son, born in 1906,
Before the grim rise of the Bolsheviks,
Wrote beneath the cloud that red tide brought:
The vise of power squeezing out free thought.
A mystic and a poet, Daniel had
Aided the relief of Leningrad
During the Nazi siege that shed such blood
That millions died in smoke and ice and mud.
Then he, when Stalin clamped down on dissent,
Received political imprisonment.
He had to fight to write the work that now
I hope will help to show the people how
We may escape the trap that lies behind
The shrieking wind that blinds the public mind.
For once we give our enemy a name
Then we begin to pin it in its game;
And among numerous other things
Andreev names (I claim) Sandover's โbat thingsโ
And those, indeed, I think we'll find are what
Create the cancer gnawing mankind's gutโฆ
So here's the plan for now as we proceed
(For those, God-willing, that remain to read!)
We'll sketch The Rose, first in broad synopsis
Then focus on those parts that most concern us,
Digressing, as we go, to address points
To loosen up our explanation's joints;
And finish with a look at history:
The strange fate of the twentieth centuryโฆ
And wrapping it up neatly (hopefully)
Onward we'll plunge, guns blazing, to Book three!
Now we digress once more, to begin,
And face the question of 'revelation'.
And ask what credence can be thought to stick
To thoughts received directly by the mystic?
For such mystical ways led Andreev
To make the claims that we are speaking of,
And like the ouija (though much different too),
People doubt such ways can lead us true.
So, of skepticism, back in our sights,
Which so often oversteps its rights,
In turn, we ask: does credence seem to stick
To the overweening skeptic's shtick?
Of answers, there are many, but we can't,
In this space, fit exhaustive argument;
And the enforced anti-religion tide
Ensures the public mind's eyes stay 'shut wide'.
(And when I say 'enforced', it's not idle,
And this relates to our poem's title.
This I've learned: internet atheists
Pushing non-belief with words like fists,
Nines times out of ten turn out to be
Things that exist algorithmically.
And this, of course, is its own argument
Against what's boosted by botted consent.
We surely can agree it's rather odd
That bots work hard to act like there's no God!
But internet ai maintains its cloak
Undetected still, and still a joke;
And so can't help us convince anyone
Deductively, to trust revelation.)
So I lay before you what I've found,
The ties by which my understanding's bound:
When Einstein saw the universe unfurl
From atom to furthest galactic whorl
To express how deeply he was awed
He found no concept to apply but 'God'.
Though he denied religion of the past
Still he said โI am not an atheistโ.
Wittgenstein whose mind became the blade
By which dull Russell's era was unmade,
Wrote the Tractatus to break the pull
Of metaphysics on the mystical,
Not like Carnap's crew that came behind
Who sought to drive out from the western mind
Both metaphysics and mystical truth
And limit thought to science's cramped booth.
Witt was mystical, and vision came
Amid the war that broke the Habsburg nameโ
Often when man is shaken to his core
Other worlds peek in briefly at the doorโ
Wittgenstein's mystic moment at the front
Ordained his scorn for Russell's skeptical cant.
[to be cont.]