thoughts about thoughts.

BS"D Next to Dave Barry's "the only Dave Barry travel guide you will ever need," I am just finishing the best bathroom book I have ever read, the diary of Eric Hoffer, 1958-59. I would rank Eric Hoffer's book, The True Believer, Thoughts on Mass Movements as a book of genuine wisdom, not Torah but wisdom that can be applied to Torah. But his diary gives an insight into a truly extraordinary human being, a Russian longshoreman working the docks in San Francisco who never attended grammar school, but who thought and wrote. He lived alone, never married and spent all his free time with a married woman and her son, and only occasionally the husband. Self educated, but profoundly well educated (he read everything) and knew something about everything and a great deal about a few things, about life, about society, about freedom, about change. He considered the intellectual to be the ultimate tyrant and enemy of freedom. The intellectual is corrupted by power more than any other person. And he is not satisfied with his rulership until he has you crawling on your hands and knees and begging for the very thing that you hate. I call anything that manipulates people without their knowledge, subliminally or through the use of ritual and tradition, a form a kishuf, witchcraft. All religion is steeped in witchcraft. And what is worse, all religion has some element of the truth held captive. And only now in this generation, do we have the power and knowledgle to remove the captive spark in all of them except one, kelipat Amalek. But soon ... its days are coming to an end, Baruch Hashem.