Our Brief Transit Across Expansive Time

We know the difference between animals and humans, but fail whenever we attempt to say what it is. The difference, as simply and as honestly as I can state it, is that we are a fiction and the animal is a fact. The fact of our physical identity is confounded by the fiction of our metaphysical identity. The physical animal is neglected, like a dog with a distracted owner, like the health and hygiene of a junkie. We are obsessed with our imaginary worlds and metaphysical selves, and we fixate all our energies on their maintenance and improvement, like an old man with a model railroad, like Disney with his Magic Kingdom, like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Gene Roddenberry, or J.K. Roweling. Our world, the one we call real, and ourselves, those we call authentic, are no more physical and present than Gandalf or Harry Potter. Our lives are narratives with parts played by characters we invent. We are merely the sorcerer who conjures them as surrogates for the warm and real facts from which consciousness is necessarily and permanently estranged. There is and never will be a communion of self and world; the consummation would mean the annihilation of both not because one has any effect on the other, but because the joining is impossible. That hasn't stopped us from trying to make our fictions fact, to arrest infinite time and exist in a kind of stasis inside a dominion of compulsive power.

We're children, I suppose, and this world is our romper room. Its destruction may be necessary to end our rampage. Only in the ruins of a once-nurturing reality will we realize that the metaphysical was never Truth; it was always hypothesis, and our conscious self is only a tool used by our animal nature to direct attention and observe deliberate experience. There is no creator God; there is only our attentive and thoughtful participation in creation. We are not agents of a greater power; there is not and never will be a destiny other than what we make happen. We are responsible but there is no ideal against which our choices will be compared. Life perseveres without purpose, and by imposing purpose on life we determined its death. Why, then, to be or not to be? Must there be a purpose, a final effect of all these disassociated causes? Only this: life, experience, and happiness in each of our brief transits across expansive time.