Thought, particularly representational thought, creates worlds within us. We see our actual world through the lenses these inner worlds comprise. As they are often cruelly distorted, so what we see, and do… and how we react and respond, as individuals and groups… is most often the result of the distortions in the lens… and our human, and even personal cultural worlds often revolve specifically around these distortions.

We carry within us a strange representational universe, largely the result of cultural immersion, through which we attempt to understand relationships and beings within and around us. Ironically, this lens is comprised of material that aggrandizes itself, distorts what it transmits for its own benefit, and pretends to be holy, heroic, or both.

And these activities become machines, of a sort, inside us. Soon, we are serving them. Soon, the car is driving the driver, much more of the time than the driver is driving the car. A tool wants to be god not because it is animate, but because it too easily becomes the prosthesis of projection for inchoate or chaotic aspects of our egoic and psychic anatomy. The mind is powerful, but it is also extremely vulnerable to the peculiar compulsions that each of its acquired prostheses purvey as the natural result of their activation and development.