I had a strange revelation, which I’ve talked about before, when I was suddenly able to see the movement of human thought across time. I saw that the truth was that everyone was right about everyone else. I heard the accusations and warnings of one side against the other. I heard their perspectives. And I listened to them both. And I suddenly realized they were the same. And they were all correct. And all incorrect, in such similar ways.
In fact the two voices were remarkably similar. They found different means of expression, different dangers, different grounds for seeing the world, and it was all true. All were pieces that fit together to form one great self-balancing, self-correcting, self-elaborating, self-experimenting, self-testing system. The whole was this sort of enormous machine in multiple parts spread across many consciousnesses and many lives. It was a vast body. And in its parts it lived through many lives.
It was hard for me to live with this vision, for two reasons. First, it was just too much to fit into one mind and maintain balance and coherence. Second, the massive amount of contradiction, the sheer plethora of error, the way everything was out of balance and in balance only by figuring and struggling and tearing at one another, that everyone was completely right about all the worst things about each other and all the ways the world and humanity could go wrong, that all those errors and dangers were real and existed simultaneously and no one was safe, all were limited and condemned, that broke me.
Life seemed to be a war of stupidity against stupidity, and no one was better off than anyone. All are punished. All fall short of the glory, the unity and completeness and harmony of God. Error produces sickness, sickness is sin, error is inevitable, therefore sin is inevitable. It is our natural state. And no state we can be born into can save us from it. None of us can singly contain the whole.
The only way in which we do contain the whole between us is a body of death, of conflict and extremity struggling against extremity, eliminating one another, fighting to determine the future and deny it to others, suffering and dying for our mistakes and indulgences and blind spots, swinging back and forth between extremes, never any wiser, never any different. A comedy of errors strewn across time. And it filled me with loathing for all mankind. Because that problem cannot be solved. Because that many-headed creature at war with itself is what humanity is, what it seems it must be.
Maybe we have gotten better at it in some ways, and maybe we have also gotten worse. Our swings to extremes in the last century were massive and catastrophic in their experimentation and consequences. And although we retreated from them in fear, they haven’t passed away. Memories are short. The danger remains, sleeping.
And we haven’t stopped finding other ways to toy with our own extremities. We find new ways to experiment with ourselves and see what beasts may arise. We build up voracious, all-consuming versions of our voice to devour the world within itself. And beasts rise to oppose them in return, as must be. The body reacts to itself, to contend with its counterpoint. The threat is sensed, the danger recognized, the correction arises, and the test begins. The greater the experiment, the greater the test; the greater the test, the greater the response.
And we keep hoping that if only we can reduce the world to just one facet, one voice, if only we can convert or destroy all of the other kind, we will find our utopia. If only we can fix that one thing wrong with the structure of the world, it will fix everything wrong with ourselves. And so every ideological utopia we plan launches a fresh hell of our own destruction. Even our best intentions go wrong, because we cannot prepare for what we cannot see. We are all at odds with one another over the very thing we need from one another. We hate one another for the precious truths we hold about one another.
Why must we hate those truths? Why must their voices be silenced? Because they tell a terrible tale. That we are limited, that we are incomplete, that we are imperfect, that we need, that we err, that we are not enough. That the tower cannot stand. We possess the collective vision of a god, but cannot bear those divine garments. We cannot makes sense of a world shattered by the babble of all these contradicting and discordant voices. We crave either unity or the silence within our own heads.
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