Most people are no longer willing to think only the things
we’re told it’s permitted to think. But
they’re not used to thinking their own thoughts, so they dream only of destroying
this decadent old world without thinking how to replace it with a new and
better one.
That our civilisation is decadent is an idea almost as old
as the idea of civilisation itself. It
arose when we decided what we call civilisation is what we call an illusion.
We used to believe it used to be real, that there was once an
age when we knew truths we’ve since forgotten.
Now we realise that if
there is an ultimate truth, we never knew it and never will. Our finite minds can’t know a truth that's infinite. What’s true for us always
was, and always will be, what we call myth, or illusion. The ignorance we call our decadence is therefore not
due to our having forgotten truths we used to know.
It’s due to our refusal to admit we know what we know.
We tell ourselves we’re infinitely curious, but that’s not
true. We look only for evidence that
confirms we are what we think we are, and our world is what we think it
is. We don’t want to know the truth if
it contradicts those myths.
Mystics have always told us we’re greater than we know, but
we don’t want to be greater than we know if it means we’re only part of
a greater whole which we don’t know, and should therefore care about those we call strangers because we’re
all related. We want to be told the self
we know is great enough because even if we don’t know everything, we know enough. We know everything worth knowing.
We
become less by ignoring that greater self of which the self we know is
only a part. But we also learn by
doing it, because only by separating ourselves into the known and the unknown self, subject and object, can we look at and know ourselves. But juggling both, as we dance from birth to
death, is a difficult art. When we give our
attention to one more than the other, thinking one is real and the other an
illusion, we stumble.
Ever since we began to think, those we call wise debated which
is real and which an illusion; but their assumption that it must be one or
the other, not both, is itself an illusion.
It’s always both, because the truth is infinite and contains all the things that seem to our finite minds
opposites.
In recent centuries we’ve come to believe that only the self we know is real. Now we can no longer live together because we
can no longer recognize our kinship with others. But that was not our first mistake.
Ever since we began to think, we’ve assumed that for us to
live together, some must rule and others must be ruled.
We assumed we needed rulers because we knew ourselves too well to imagine
we could rule ourselves. But our rulers
are no more able to rule themselves than we are; even less are they able to rule us. So they only pretended to rule us, and we only
pretended to obey them.
We’ve lied to each other, and to ourselves, in order to live
together. Our polity has always been a
conspiracy to which we’re all parties. But now we’re tired of pretending we
believe the lies, so our polity is breaking apart.
Again and again we tried to take it apart and rebuild it
better. Every time we failed. Now we’ve lost faith in ourselves and our
ability to change things for the better.
We want only to destroy this decadent old world.
It’s too late for us to change, and we know it, however much
we try not to know what we know; so we dream of decadence, as I’ve been doing ever
since I began to think. But this is not decadence, because there never was a better age
from which ours has declined. This is
only a change.
Life on this planet is dying, but this is only a change. What we call life is not the norm from which
any change is a decline. It’s not even
the norm on this planet. There are other
ways of being. The norm, if there is one, seems to be what we call nonbeing only
because ours is the only way of being that we know. And we’ve cobbled together this way from what we call
illusion as much as from what we call reality.
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