Jack Kerouac

Kerouac and Cassady Pick Up a Hitchhiker

Sal’s and Dean’s wanderings are exercises in detachment. The road detaches them from the binding conventionalities of normal society. As a result, they are able to enjoy everything and everyone, even the most disgusting, because they are able, in their unique way, to see God’s stamp of goodness on everything. At one point, for instance, they pick up an “incredibly filthy” hitchhiker at Dean’s insistence. The man is covered with scabs and is reading a muddy paperback he found in a culvert. They sit close to him and dig him the whole time, genuinely getting a kick out of talking to him, but without any hint of malice. They really like the guy and are totally absorbed by him. After dropping him off, Dean excitedly says about picking up the hitchhiker: “I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!” His attitude resembles St. Francis’s affection for lepers and Mother Teresa’s love for the diseased downtrodden in Calcutta.

The Five Parts of Existence Strikes Back and The Hemisphere Hypothesis

Part I What is the Tao? The Tao, also called “the act of existence (actus essendi),” “the first principle of Zen,” and the region on the other side of Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception, is the nameless reality that is logically, conceptually, and in reality prior to everything else.

Why the Left Hemisphere is Ineluctably Drawn to Abstractions

The left hemisphere’s primary goal is to allow its host to survive. Practical considerations drive the left hemisphere. You might think this means the left hemisphere isn’t much interested in abstractions or idealized notions. Such things, at first glance, aren’t practical. But the thing is, abstractions are

The Left Hemisphere Deranges People Out of the Local, Driving Them Through Rationalism into the Clutches of Ideology, including Nationalism

The community is embodied existence: you rub against the white trash and the petty; you rub against flawed humans like yourself. You have to deal with it . . . in reality, not in a rational idea. When you escape it through abstraction, you become the anti-Mother Teresa

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