But consider this: Our cartesian propagandizing accepts only the objective world of Ayn Randians, yet, dig this, not one of us actually lives in that world!

We don’t. We don’t live in it, we don’t experience it, we don’t interact with it, it is like Einstein’s aether, an unexperienceable quantity which is therefore a profoundly meaningless concept! Think about that while you think about this: The real world, the tangible experiential world in which I sit as I conceive and write this and in which you sit as your read and conceive what I wrote, is a cognitive construct borne of neurological sensors biologically tuned and connected across chemical interactions with Ayn Rand’s “objective” reality. That’s worth repeating: The reality you and I live and love in is cognitive, not ‘physical’. It has no need of behaving according to the rules of the physics du jour, it has no need of being ‘consistent’ or ‘constant’ or even ‘predictable’, nor does it have any rules to say it cannot be any of those things. The best we can say about this world of our human experience is that it is a mirror-world which is itself composed of the quarks and muons of the Objective World, and thus may someday be discovered as an effect of the ‘physical’ world, but bottom line for you and I living inside the experience, it is a dreamworld, literally, physically and in every reality, it is a dreaming.

QED.

So all these stories, they aren’t desensitizing you, or jading you or misleading you or disorienting you. Every last one of them is screaming at you to pay attention and see; as it is written, He who is now called ‘prophet’ was once called ’seer’. Once seen, one can look for patterns, for principles of gestalt effect, then learn to manipulate the gestalt to obtain an effect or manipulate the effect on some given gestalt (because it is a dreamworld, it is maleable and fluid) and that then moves into the vocation we call shamanism.

Feel any better now?

Of course, I may be handing out a truth here … but it’s also a lie

Balance is needed. One probably appreciates poetry more the better understanding of the language he/she has. Prioritize the ancient maxim “Know Thyself” - where hope is likely first born - then unleash one’s unique barbaric yawp before the world.

If it is all only metaphor, then let us pick the best ones and thumb our noses at the ones that bore us or scare us into complacency.

If ever there was a time in human history for us to make our own personal choice about the story we’re to follow, this is it. Joseph Campbell remarked that we, today, live in a “terminal moraine” of mythology — many of them old, broken, shattered and nearly forgotten by their contemporaries. Yet, the light of these metaphors has not gone out fully. A spark remains that we each may turn into a fire.

When ever would a time be more appropriate for us each to delve into the wilderness and return with the burning flame? Each of us is a unique phenomenon in this world; each of us must find or construct our own symbol- and story-system to bring this wasteland to life. May the metaphors of our own choosing be planted within, taking root as they may in the fertile soil of our own human spirit.