Many moderns have forgotten (or failed to discover) the lion’s share of what it means to be human. Others have confused scrambled remnants of our perceptions of ancient traditions for new religions — or have mixed their science-fiction fantasies with their metaphysics. Still others have mistaken the hallucinations produced by drug experience with sacred revelation.

Everywhere we look, we find endless arrays of mimics advertising and selling what they spin as intelligence, wisdom, enlightenment and salvation. What’s actually on sale is a cognitive and relational slave-collar, and a developmental phase-lock. This is the ‘great reward’ of our cultural education. It’s hard not to feel disgust and hopelessness when this is clearly understood.

When its dangers are poorly understood, representational consciousness breeds endless cults of personality and concept. These are so aggressive and domineering that they force their beneficial cousins into hiding, while acquiring incomprehensible expanses of terrain within human minds, lives, activity, and culture. Most of us are too deeply scripted or too narrowly educated to escape the magnetic pull of their endless threats and falsely seductive advertisements.

But it is not impossible that we may recover, in new form, some of our original insight about Nature and our species’ relationships with(in) it. I believe that, eventually, we will be forced to.

The question is this: how much damage will we have to do before we are forced to awaken to the astonishing roles we have ignored in favor of those which have crippled our minds, toxicified our cultures, and utterly failed to deliver the purported human progress and prosperity they have so long, at every possible cost, falsely promised?