There are legitimate reasons to desire to preserve a rational worldview. The chaos that beckons from beneath the established social and linguistic order never ceases its hissing. A violent reaction to understanding the fragility of the shallow forms of regularity and continuity we enjoy is to be expected. Not because a rationally determined world is more desirable, or because it is a matter of fact, but because it is convenient.
The faculty of ratio has heretofore been focused primarily on solving mechanical problems for the purpose of facilitating ease and comfort in human life. It was hypothesized that surplus leisure time would give mankind the opportunity to reflect on more subtle matters. Has this proven to be the case?
Leisure time that should be invested in the inner development of moral and intellectual quality is instead consumed with superfluous work pursued in order to accrue enough substance to pay for the added comfort, convenience and consumption we have made into the ends of our advancement.
Obviously ratio‘s monomania over control of external conditions, while bringing great boons in terms of food production and medical care, has also forcibly removed the urgency from daily life and has driven people smothered by comfort to suppress their consciousness or seek their death. Life loses meaning without a mythos: a story to act out, an Image to embody.
Life itself is the sensuous reflection of the Image; the Image is the empty hub our wheel rolls around. While the same rules of projection and reflection maintain over time, the forms of the projected and reflected Image are the results of habit. Habit is entrenched iterability, each layer of recursion increasing specificity. Repetition forms the basis of apparent continuity (continuum).
Continuity and consistency are the qualities of those perceptions of which we choose to take ownership. “This” I think, “is my identity, this am I, this is mine.”
So long as one seeks externally, he will never find the essential. Grabbing the serpent by the tail, it turns and takes you down. Pinning the snake by the head with the fork of discernment, one may see Natural Law and its modes of rhythm moving one’s own body.
Led along a linear assumption, we believed there could be an end.
Realizing endlessness, the question remains what to make of it.
