Lehal Library

To make this question intelligible, we must digress a bit here so I can have a stab at pointing up that the nature of those real ways and byways elude the cognizance of compulsive optimists, bliss bunnies, spirituality-ists and others who are likewise illiterate, naive or stupid regarding them. For the most part, those real ways and byways are hard, demanding, cruel, unforgiving, even unmerciful and completely and entirely competitive -- and, it should as well be said, often deadly. The softer more elevating worlds of the good and creative, of sweetness and light, of encapsulated optimism eternal, do exist, I think. But hardly within the realms of human activity I unexpectedly entered into in 1971, when I was thirty-eight years old. The above nutshell viewpoint has been rendered pointedly based not on philosophical speculation, but based on my intimate and long-term experience. The softer more elevating worlds DO NOT really exist, or are only incidental, within the inner social workings of psychical research, parapsychology, science, skepticism, philosophy, politics, government, the American intelligence community -- and clearly DO NOT exist within the realms of international espionage. All of those topics can be inspiring, of course, and redolent with creative purposes. But what is inspiring and what is real are two different matters.