No one is a prophet...  Is it a cliché, or does it offer a statement on consciousness?  (Who would even want to approach the hot potato old statement?  Book reviewers do not like when you touch cliché.)

To be in touch with a deeper level of consciousness, as you might simply get just from studying Buddhism or participating in mediation, or practicing yoga, would that not almost put you into a sort of different relationship to the normal debates about current affairs....  "Hawk or dove, what do you do with Putin:, is there not a direct correlation between the lack of capitalism and vast amount of poor people in South America and here you've got the Pope saying this..."  Such points have a validity, they deal with the world we live in, but maybe to you personally there might be more to it all than that.  Your attitude toward them could put you in a different place than that of your 'home town.'

Deeper consciousness... that would strike as being irrelevant to the topic of conversation the pundits are arguing about.  And the people of the town turn on their television sets and listen to their side of the arguments, both is you're lucky, and then internalize it.  And you with your Buddha thoughts... you're the child at the dinner table, the eccentric artist doing what you do as long as you feel you have the right to it, even as that wears thin.

Each town has a distinct feel.  New York, of course, is different from Washington, DC, which is entirely different than New Orleans, on and on.  Paris is one thing, Rome is another, they all have their sort of moods.  That's the way it goes.

But then with the United States, and elsewhere, there is mass media.  The press is essential to democracy.  Mass media, we all watch the Weather Channel, can kind of bleed over the minds, the common commercials we all see, the personalities we engage with remotely...

Is it that the voice that comes from the subconscious depths doesn't seem to immediately fit anywhere.  How does it become part of the culture, the way Fellini's dreams became?  How do you shape your own individual identity in the conversation of identities?  If you're not conspicuously from any conscious pattern, GI Joe, an investment banker, a wine guy, keeping within the limits of what is currently expected from you...  Where does James Joyce fit in to that;  how would you define him, and what was he doing, and what is the point?  Same for Yeats.  And yet, ultimately, those guys had a home, somewhere in Ireland, figuratively or literally...

When does the inner spark catch?  How?  When is it not relegated to the sidelines...