meaning, magic, collapse

The world is over, and to be honest, it never really existed.

A world that you might want to conquer, fix, set free, make yours, or meekly belong to. Then, by the time you actually manage to research and craft the tools needed to attempt at any of those things, you realize that that world no longer exists. It has dramatically changed and become the illusion of another generation of human beings. It is a subtle delusion that you might casually have perceived at a very young age, or seldom over the course of your life.

You ultimately realize that the world unfolds to your senses after it actually has happened. The delay inherent to your perceptual systems reveals that you always have lived in the past.

You start to get old. As the days pass, your expectations and certainties crumble along with your identity, you start feeling miserably inadequate, perhaps you pathetically seek salvation in some hopeless rejuvenation technology, therapy or nutritional regimens. You just don’t want to accept death. Death of your body, death of your emotions, death of your ego. Maybe you want to write a book, dodging once more the inevitable option of killing your self-importance for good. Most likely, instead, you remain suspended in the air, subjected to other people’s projections that form and inform you about who you are and what you do.

Overturning this spell requires an incredible amount of energy. The kind of energy needed is basically accumulated quotas of attention: a very rare ingredient to capture and conserve in this very distracted times.

The small set of remarkable people that manage to do so interrupt the course of history, the chain of their own thoughts, they erase their own personal history, cleaning their nervous systems from any accumulated thought or sensation —  managing to ambush their self-importance, their obsessions and their ego with a combination of patience, cunning, ruthlessness, and sweetness. Their ruthlessness is not harshness, their cunning is not cruelty, their patience is not negligence and their sweetness should not be mistaken for foolishness. These people lose their daily human form and navigate into the infinite. They grok the infinite. They become infinite.

What these people know is nothing special nor secret. ‘Esoteric’ is not what is secret, it’s rather what is obvious, so obvious to become forgotten, so forgotten to become secret, so secret to become ‘esoteric’.

‘Grok’ means all of these. … ‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man. — Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein