Castles In The Sky
"He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." - Gandalf
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
This quote is an excellent illustration of Tolkien the Philosopher. He is here stating a basic fact of Nature. We can only learn about life from within, all theories and analyses are dead unless we are practically applying them.
In our moden world, we have dissected every living concept of life down to the mental sub-atomic level, intellectualizing anything we can wrap our minds around (and many things that we cannot). Then we have turned around and built castles in the sky, dead static images of our lives that we have come to convince ourselves are real.
Our lives become like living history farms, neither living, nor history, and definitely not farms. We become perpetual tourists, playing at living like a Hollywood production.
We live in this great world of play-acting, wherein younger generations are shown and taught from birth how to conform to the collective delusion. We are indoctrinated to rebel against anything that does not fit into our atmospheric kingdom, especially if it hails from that more earthly realm of cold, hard reality.
We have deemed ourselves divine royalty, the arbitrators of truths and falsehood, and yet we have built our kingdoms out of sand. We poach the true lives of others, be they from our historic past or those who are less economically able to stray from harsher realities.
We have shattered human life into a thousand splinters and are ever attempting to place these pieces in some sort of workable order. This will never do. We will never accomplish our goal, because God through Nature has established a growth process to move us from truth to Truth.
No amount of analysis can resolve a problem that requires real world effort. Solutions are given to us by Nature when we need them, in the midst of the challenges that force themselves upon us. Life will not freely give us all the answers to make our experience easy and comfortable. We must learn things the hard way, it is the only way to get it deep into the marrow of our bones.
We spend endless amounts of time of trivialities. We tirelessly modify the exterior to cover up the fact that there is little interior to speak of. We will not cure this situation the same way that we have created it.
We cannot intellectually comprehend our problems and then sit back in the smug confidence that because 'know we now', there shouldn't be anymore problems. We must begin building our foundations on the solid rock of reality. Obviously this may be far from the fantasy world of our long-cultivated, deeply cherished beliefs.
We must find out the Truth by being open-minded and eternally diligent. What we know, we must test. If it falls apart, this is not a case of propaganda. Life is trying to teach us something, if we refuse the lesson because we know better, because it 'shouldn't be that way', we merely become neurotics, and over a longer period of time, total psychotics.
Rather than allow Life to destroy all our inaccurate assumptions and false beliefs, we must take an active role in the process. We will only allow others to push us so far before we succumb to the delusion that they are trying to harm us by feeding us propaganda, when in all reality, they are simply trying to show us the facts around us. This can cause us to become violently 'defensive', but following the principle that the best defense is a good offense, we become bullies ourselves to those who are just honest, kindly people.
We are battling our egos, it is a life or death struggle. The term ego-death is no misnomer. And our pride will not go down without a fight. In fact, it is willing to kill us in the fight to protect our personal opinions. We must never allow it to have the upper hand, we must consider appeasement to be exactly what it is: pure suicide.
If we focus on Truth and reality, we need not spend our time tearing down our castles in the sky. We merely need to busy ourselves with the practical application of every truth we can use in daily living. This will take us so long to achieve, and as we will receive more truths to work with during the procedure, that by the time we feel we have finished, the fantasy will have faded away of its own accord.
No need to battle ghosts or clouds, better to bring our heads down to Earth to pilot our hands and feet. For hands and feet are what our world yearns and crys for.