HERMETICA

Is it okay to talk about this yet? When have our minds ever helped us? The royal “us”, as in all of us.

If my soul says “I am…”, echoing my spirit, which itself echoes what is, then my mind inserts and fills in a blank: “I am —·—·—”.

I am willing. I am able. I am intent. I am grieving.

Here in the Postmodern West mired in the totalitarian gridlock of coronavirus, we’re experiencing a crashing tidal wave of techno-stress and agora-loneliness. We have built a flabbergasting array of tools to prevent and assuage suffering and to connect each of us to just about anyone else. And yet, by any account, we are no happier.

It is a landmark event in anyone’s life: the sudden comprehension that there are others. For most of us, this lightning bolt strikes before we have developed the grammar or syntax we would need to construct a memory of such a concept. Consequently we don’t remember it. But it strikes none the less and we bear the scar throughout our lives. The bolt misses some—perhaps they dodge it—who are no doubt baffled by the rest of us who once were of one mind and now perceive many, who call ourselves members of society, humanity, or civilization.