Paradise Lost Again
I have just read Milton's Paradise Lost for the third time. But this time I did not spurn it as obsolete mythology. I honored it as actual history. Dynamic inner history, happening on subtler planes of energy and consciousness, in the causal realm behind the surface of the material world, where a very real struggle takes place between angelic and demonic powers. To me, in my dotage, this reading of Milton explains the drama behind earth's theater much better than the smug materialist reductionism of Marxist economics, Freudian psychology, or sophomore sociology class. The astral conflict in the subtle realm backstage can no longer be contained. Now it overflows into the plane of sensory experience. In Shakespeare's words, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." The moral ambiguity of postmodern intellectuals no longer explains why seemingly stable people suddenly perform acts of unspeakable violence, terrorism, infanticide...
