FROM THE WILDERNESS
Plight
by James Strauss
The door into reality gapes open, swinging wide and then slamming shut, as pain and frightened alienation leave anyone left alive and standing…staring in paralyzed wonder at a closed surface once again veneered over with unbelievable thin but impenetrable layers of mythology. The reality remains embedded into the former participants core being even after they re-emerge from it to again experience the mythological construct we call civilization. The reality is not one of memory so much as one bringing the awful gift of full awareness. Combat in the field opens this Medusa door, as does traumatic loss of friends, family, and total strangers resulting from outrageous catastrophe. Our culture refers to symptomatic revelations following the experience of reality by terming it ‘post traumatic stress disorder,” prescribing drugs and therapy to diminish terrible memories, and then waiting for time and re-emersion back into the mythological construct of culture to ‘heal’ the reactor.
Therapy does not work. Drugs only mask. Time itself and the re-emersion process only allow sufficient accommodation in how to deal with a society that knows little, if anything, of reality to the point where ‘normal’ people cannot understand that the reactor to the experience, if he or she survives, has merely learned how to ‘fake it to make it’ and live some sort of regular life next to them. Entering or gaining physical knowledge of reality cannot be taken back. Reality cannot be explained to others who have had no experience with it. The most detailed descriptions of it and greatest credibility brought to bear on it yield only disbelief, lack of acceptance and eventual distancing from it and anyone attempting to discuss it.
Culture divides for any person who’s survived to become knowledgeable in reality, like the infamous cat in the Schrodinger mind experiment. In one reality a container holding a live cat is opened and the cat is dead. In another reality the cat is alive. A study in reality would be participation in this experiment but as an observer witnessing both realities taking place simultaneously. The observer would know that at least two eventualities exist at the same time but that same observer could never be successful in convincing anyone not participating that this was true and that they had experienced it. In fact, the reactor to witnessing the events would have his or her life changed forever not just by participating in this hypothetical version of reality but by a complete inability to continue life just as before. The knowledge itself would dramatically change each and every life experience thereafter, the same as if that person had witnessed God in physical form.
The plight of survivors from reality are many and varied but all revolve around one simply redemptive quality. The survivors will spend the rest of their lives attempting to help others with things ‘normal’ people are generally incapable of doing themselves. They will exercise inordinate courage in the face of risk. They will gamble on people and circumstance unthinkable to that normal public. They will help other people without the ability to explain to those same people that they are doing so because they have come to know reality even when the help fails many more times than it succeeds. The survivors of reality never quit once they have made it back because they all come to discover that the mythological construct is the magic allowing for the continued growth, spread and universal dominance of humankind. Mythological-founded life is to be lived with bliss, joy and pleasure while reality is only to be survived in any miserable compromising way possible. If you cannot understand this article then it is because you do not share the plight of those whom have gaped through that door into reality and survived, and you may well be the better for it.
