“If you say that ‘there’s no truth; who cares?’ why do you say it like you’re right? — Connor Oberst, Bright Eyes
People are confused. An individual person may or not be confounded by reality. But as a whole, humanity seems to have only ever moved from one age of confusion to another. In the beginning, we swam in an ocean of chaos and superstition, with dragons at the edges of every map. We conquered chaos and slayed the dragons, dividing the world into kingdoms, kingdoms cannibalized each other into empires, and each empire believed that their capital was the center of all civilized culture. As the empires of the world came to see some value in each other, or at least the unique resources and crafts which were useful in generating massive fortunes, an age of enlightenment flourished. And enlightenment brought with it reductionism, the belief that everything could be reduced to its constituent parts. We sacrificed meaning and culture on the altar of progress. We were so proud of shedding our superstitions, but meaning, adventure, and joy went with them. So the human spirit rebelled against the modernity, unsatisfied that it had killed God, society set out to kill Virtue, Beauty, and Truth as well. And here we are, safer, warmer, and more well fed and drugged than we’ve ever been — yet no less discontent. Human society, as a whole, has never failed to recreate the confusion and chaos we were born from in any age.
No one should hope to heal humanity of confusion with a few strokes of a pen. For millennia the sages have described the exact same flaws in the mind and spirit. The Mahabharata, the Arthashastra, the Torah, Al-Zohar, the Gospel, and so many others all show us our flaws and the path to becoming whole. These texts also show us why society will persist in its suffering, but not necessarily you. You specifically can find a healthy way of relating to reality. And society progresses slowly forward as more individuals do make the hard choice to let go of their comfortable limitations and grow into our potential.
One of the first steps in stepping out of confusion, in this age of ascending post-modern madness, is to accept that there is a reality. You may not be able to know much about it in absolute terms, but there are ways of relating to it reasonably.
What you’ll find in the rest of this chapter:
The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.
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