The Fall
“There is in fact, a god – namely, the world. To participate in its divinity, all that is necessary is to consent.”
Albert Camus
Having renounced both God and History, we live in tension. Baptized in chaos we no longer seek unity. Those who came before spoke of Reason, Justice, and Equality. Yet each articulated principle was quickly enforced through its opposite so that virtues which were to enable our ascension became chains which bound us to the artifices of the earth.
Consciousness is and always has been our burden. Consciousness marked our fall and separated us in mind from the world in which our bodies resided. Perhaps we first reflected only on the death of living beings around us, but on that fateful day when we cast our eye inwards our fate was sealed.
Conscious and alone, our ancestors lived in a world filled with suffering and condemned to death. Yet the patterned lights in the night sky, the gentle breezes of whispering forests and grasslands, and each flaming sunset spoke of a higher order, a purpose, a Creator. Early women and men huddled close to one another around the soft light of crackling fires and spoke humbly of the eternal. Conjecture articulated poetry articulated myth articulated God. Fire forged tools forged structure forged Society. God of Society became Society of God became Society as God.
Each new birth first required a violent death. Each new proof required first a renunciation of former truths. In this, our abstract ideas, which we believed to exist on an immortal and sacred plane, expressed the eternal patterns of a natural world. Sacred ideologies blossomed from the corpse of sacred religions as mushrooms on a fallen tree.
New ideas, models, and frameworks soared from within our minds and restored our hope that paradise was not yet lost, it was simply further than initially thought. We used our bodies to shape instruments and our minds to shape laws, believing each iteration would bring us closer to unity, for it is indeed unity that we crave. Unity with the boundless creation stretched across the earth and sky. For in knowing death, we longed for life. We stalked our paradise with a fear of death and an insatiable hunger for immortality. And as any predator understands, ending the pursuit is not an option. Indeed, our hunger drove us over deserts and mountains, rivers and seas. We set fire to a creation we could not understand and felt apart from.
We brought hell to earth in our quest for heaven. The will to understand must precede to urge to reform, but how can one reform what one can never comprehend? Abstract ideas of unquestionable purity and strength became brittle and shattered when brought into the physical world of peoples in places. I do not need to tell you that the most dangerous person is someone who has just witnessed the death of a sacred principle. Mortal women and men sacrificed their lives for principles they believed would bring immortality. And yet rising from each bloody conflict were new ideas, new principles, and new truths, proving once and for all that the old gods had died once more.
And so, our concepts which were to guide us towards a lost paradise in an abstracted universe, instead expressed the flesh and blood truths of birth and death. The sacred creation of our minds expressed the same unintelligible universe perceived by our physical senses. Deceived by our own intelligence, we believed that our minds could conjure a universe in harmony. Guided by our sacred intellect, we would bring this harmony to the world of flesh and blood. We would murder anyone who obstructed our eternal destiny. And so, generation after generation, man killed man in the name of Truth while truth murdered truth in the name of Man.
When we, conscious as ever, became aware of this pattern, the abstract and the physical collapsed into a single frame and we awoke delirious from our fever dream. The trap which had been set at the dawn of consciousness had finally snapped shut. Conscious and alone as before, but now without hope of escaping our fate.
There are those who suggest that this represents a second fall from creation, but not I. I believe that it is now time for us to stand and once again walk forward. But this time, we shall not tremble and kneel before an illusion of what we are or who we should be. Our destiny is death and we walk towards it without fear, though we know not when it will strike.
