User:Nereus

From Veritas

April 23, 2007 | The Mindkiller

Afternoon. Little clouds. Very bright.

K was right. This was a mistake. It always had been, from the beginning. Maybe now I can collude with the rest of creation, with its cosmic practical joke.

Whoever described the occult sciences, mysticism, what-have-you as a door was both a lunatic and a liar. You can shut doors.

It's strange, how the mind reels against the impossible. At once, it desperately searches for an anchor--a call to Reason (for what is Man but a Reasoning creature?)--and knows in its furthest recesses (where waking consciousness dare not look, for fear of being dazzled) that no Reason is to be had. Not now, perhaps never. That's the paradox: some thing is at once impossible and nightmarishly real. To its host, the mind says, "get away! Leave this course!"--

But how can I? Whether or not taking oneself across the threshold was worth the journey is not in question. There is no question. One cannot simply walk away from the affairs of Nature without, in some capacity, leaving a piece of themself behind. The cost of such abandonment grows with time--with every step out of the Cavernous depths if ignorance. The very foundation of Reason becomes interlaced, infected, and assimilated by the relentless colossus of Nature, until turning back or so much as averting one's eyes from the truth would require the expulsion of a vital fragment of Self and identity.

There's no avoiding it. To turn back, to rejoin the status quo--the security of normalcy and unquestioned sanity--would surely mean death (or worse, ignominy, though they may as well be one in the same) for the initiate. That then, is why things happen as they do in dreams; one is left with no choice, no option, but to continue the journey. No matter how violently Reason entreats.

But there is no rising Sun at the end of the fool's wearisome trek. When he--if he--finally leaves the Cave, he is not greeted by the splendor of Nature in the same capacity he may, at one time, had been. The beauty and wonderment die away, withered and gray, replaced in stead--for the eyes of the wanderer--by more half-truths, more questions.

Eventually, Reason follows. When madness is true, and the preternatural are prodigies of Nature--showing not aberration from the natural world, but being instead the most prime examples of it--what good is Reason where Reason fails?

You can shut doors.

--Nereus 10:52, 23 April 2007 (PDT)