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The early 90’s were a very promising time for art and culture in America. The children of the baby boomers, deemed Generation X, had come of age and were trying to make a difference. A marriage of punk rock attitude to 60’s style idealism came into fashion, while yuppie artifice and materialistic self indulgence lost most of its glamour. Happy Pop confections by such luminaries as Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilli were being replaced by a newer stripped down sound with raw powerful acts like Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction taking over the charts. Coffee houses, once so symbolic of the Beat generation, sprung up around the country offering a place for budding poets and artists to gather and perform. Tides were turning, and for a while it looked like the generation that had originally been seen as unmotivated “Slackers” just may have something on the agenda.
This wasn’t to be. After only a few years the tides began to shift back and the yuppies started coming out of hiding. The dot com phenomenon, along with the incredible market potential of alternative goods and services, brought the rebellious generation X an affluence they had not expected. While they set about buying extreme SUVs and Palm Pilots, the world industrial complex set about replacing the coffee houses with Starbucks and the Nirvanas with N’syncs. And no one would be the wiser - which is precisely the point.
Buddhist literature speaks of a principle called the “Wheel of life”. It’s a way of seeing existence as an endlessly recurring cycle. It is said that if one can bring themselves to step outside this cycle, then they will achieve enlightenment and become one with the universe. The trick is, knowing where the outside is.
Sometime in the early months of 1995, a young man by the name of Riz Story was spending a great deal of time looking for the outside. He had very few possessions and no permanent address. He spent his days on the beaches of southern California looking for the edge, the place of definitions. It seemed to him that society was completely insane, endlessly repeating itself while believing itself to be moving toward some nonexistent form of progress. He watched mankind pillage the earth in the name of this progress, building time-saving machinery to give himself more time to build more time-saving machinery. Society was futile and ignorant and working toward its own doom, and Riz wanted no part of it. And he knew that there were millions of others, caught up in the wheel that wanted out too.
As Riz saw his generation grasp for truth only to be lured away, he decided to hold on tighter. He released himself of the petty concerns that had overtaken others and led them astray. He fed himself with fish he caught by his own hand, spending his nights on the back seat of his old car, or under a pier on the beach. Freeing himself from the overwhelming schedule of a 9 to 5 job, bills and responsibilities afforded him the ability to catch the wisdom contained in a fleeting moment. He would spend hours, often with the aid of psychedelics, watching moments float by him, surfing waves of passing emotion like an interstellar Tom Curren. It was during this time that he caught a vision he would ride into the coming millennium.
He envisioned a world where all inhabitants lived free of the overbearing weight of their own self importance, an entire population with perceptions unobstructed by ego. Each moment to them was a universe of experience, each being a universe of innate beauty. In this world man did not seek to overcome nature, instead he worked tirelessly to become one with it. He understood that every creature held a position of utmost importance, and that every death left a void that would have to be filled again. In a universe made of shifting energy, it is this void that tells the truth of the life left behind, for even a lifetime of accomplishments could leave a void of energy that could be filled with a cockroach. And Riz saw no cockroaches here. Death was the overwhelming ruler here. There would be no killing without respect for the void left behind, and ones own death could come at any moment, making every moment of the utmost importance.
A sense of true freedom overcame Riz. He felt as if chains had been removed from him, knowing that what he had just seen was completely real, not a dream. This other world already existed, right here, it was just buried underneath a million years of bad habits and misconception. Others had seen it too, and were already working to unearth it. He thought of Native Americans and Tibetans, people that had already experienced a similar reality when mankind was spread out and divided by geography and race. Now it seemed that man was ready to become one. He knew what he had to do.
Anyone was born…
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