(It must be legit – I saw it online.)

~-~-~-~-~-~

The guy’s credentials began like this:

“For more than four hundred million years, I have protected the borders between the physical world and the worlds of shadow.”

So I knew I’d found a plumber I could trust.

I’m kidding, of course. It’s never that easy to find a good plumber.

No, the above quip came from a consciousness-awakening website, one of the billions of resources out there that promise to connect you with the cosmos while separating you from your wallet. This particular guru – we’ll call him Dr. Skippy – also claims to be a protector of this “infant race” the rest of us know as, well, us. Dr. Skippy warns that if weren’t for the efforts of “his kind,” mankind would be at the mercy of all sorts of extraterrestrial evil entities, as if the entire galaxy were filled with members of Congress.

(“His kind.” We’ve all met “his kind” before. These are the people you often see on the news, wearing loose-fitting clothing and highly-reflective hats, waiting for a comet to swing round and shuttle them back to the thin-fingered species-seeders on Neurotica Nine.)

So be thankful. Why, if not for Dr. Skippy, the Axis of Interplanetary Evil would “enslave, consume, and otherwise destroy the whole planet” — though we think and otherwise destroy was a bit of a flourish. I mean, if the bad guys consume the planet, nobody’s gonna be around for Act III and the and otherwise destroy scene.

But thanks, Dr. Skippy.

Fortunately for us mere mortals, Dr. Skippy has managed to condense all the secrets of the universe into his blog, where Dr. Skippy also hawks his self-help books:

• How to Find Your Spiritual Parents
• How to Find Your Spiritual Parents’ Wallet
• Mastering the Gluten-Free Tao
• Applied Numerology (or Why 7 8 9)
• You Won’t Go Blind

Yes. As evidenced by that last title, Dr. Skippy also thinks there are gods living in the sun, a discovery Dr. Skippy made during his college days, when he “used to stare at the sun for long periods of time.”

(We’re guessing that Dr. Skippy also used to put lots of non-controlled substances under his tongue and then shriek when his desk walked across the dorm room and ate a bat.)

Dr. Skippy insists that he’s had first-hand encounters with … um … people who live inside the sun, and he can show you how to see them, too. And all without hallucinogenic drugs, Dr. Skippy quickly points out. (perhaps too quickly, if you get my drift)

Obviously, Dr. Skippy has advanced beyond simple bipededness. As further conclusive proof that you should buy his books, Dr. Skippy anecdotally relates that he once yelled “EXPELLIARMUS” at a dog, and the dog ran away.

Hard to argue with pure science.

“But books are, like, so sterile and stuff,” you may be saying, but probably not, because you’re texting. “When it comes to getting my chakra on and my karma on, I wanna, like, involve and stuff LOL.”

Well, you have plenty of options to reach out and touch someone, preferably someone downwind. Take, for example, the recent karmic klatch known as the “Burning Man” Festival, an annual gathering of uninhibited free spirits who’ve moved beyond hide-bound, restrictive social conventions like fossil fuels, monogamy, and deodorant; a “transformative” affair in which people go to the desert, achieve transformative nakedness, and form a human crop circle. And apparently, Burning Man is catching on — this year, they made the Guinness Book of World Records as the only group of dusty naked morons visible from outer space.

For a few days each year, the Burning Maniacs stand around listening to music, making pithy observations, and occasionally wearing clothes, before returning home to their regular day jobs of annoying the spit out of the rest of us. This year’s event proved particularly transformative, when the attendees all got attacked by Occupy Wall Street mosquitos and contracted the West Nile Virus.

And they say karma has no sense of humor.