Thorns of Immortality
by Patryk Rebisz

Part II (short excerpts) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

5. Begining with Death / Climbing Mt Fuji
"Nature, just like people, is afraid of reality terrified of seeing its own ugliness. What is God's imperfection?"

"The artist had no control over the process of this intellectual annihilation of stripping his art from ideas beyond excitement of decoration. The picture [of waves overtaking Mt Fuji] started its existence as a way to prod the possibility of spiritual enlightenment, beloved by millions ending up meaningless."

"The power of this image was not in reality of the endeavour but in the potential for this endeavor to take place."

"With time, the desire for meaning turned into something else: this realization that one is part of something bigger, giving everyone hope that death isn't the end. Concept of a Being beyond the physicality of structures entered their mind. God was born."

"Technology always tempts to get to the point as if the journey didn't matter. Even understanding the indispensability of time spent on the journey, one often chooses the option requiring less commitment, forgetting that rushing to the goal could destroy the possibility to understand."

"Without the distance specified by two points - that of their origin and their destination, and the immense time it takes to transfer from one to the other, they wouldn't be explorers on the edge of profound, searching for answers to the yet undefined questions. It was the distance that made the journey, thus their lives, meaningful."

"Human aspiration always desired to go to the edge of possibilities, the moment the action of reaching became too familiar - it disappeared from people's lexicon of dreams killing something important inside."

"The Poet never found scientific arguments completely convincing because besides facts, they lacked that subliminal layer that conveyed a full understanding. As the sciences advanced, the original mysticism diminished robbing people of underlying metaphysics. Surrounded by data that quickly dispels myths, explaining a large portion of the working universe, one lost the ability and more so the desire to imagine the unexplainable. Quick access to answers severed one's ability to wonder, with every explanation taking one further away from the sheer pleasure of living."

"It was a search for the abstraction through facts that made the Poet raise up to go. He started wondering if as the travelers to the distant Planet, they weren't a sort of spiritual leaders in times marked by science's hegemony."

"The savage man didn't have the comfort of desire - he needed to know or death followed. He got his confidence from mastering the forces shaping his immediate surroundings unconcerned about the larger world that could only be attributed to mysticism and magic."

"Embracing certainty in the power of knowledge - this conviction that if one desires, the knowledge is to be gained - people became information processors only capable of computing, starved of underlying spirituality."

"The world has lost its magic because any phenomena is explainable even if temporarily beyond one's grasp. The question is not of possibility to understand but the time it takes to fully ingest the knowledge."

"The dreamer who only believes in the goal, doesn't need a temporary fulfilment - the blind faith is all that motivates because at the moment of greatest uncertainty, facts provide very little inspiration to keep on going."

"Dream requires an unflinching belief in its potential - not just doing what one is told but rather defining a goal (even if roughly) and pursuing it with unyielding belief to its very end. There is a virtue in a job well executed but it doesn't hold the same timeless value as a pure madness of dreaming."

"Bringing his ego to a complete annihilation, he was on the verge of having to construct himself anew. Still sulking in his sadness, a breath of fresh air was infusing the almost-dead fire within with a new sort of energy. He faced an abyss of opportunity but this infinite range of possibilities frightened him."

"The journey let them escape the chains of social constraints - they were free and this new freedom scared them because all they wanted was the illusion of freedom that comes with power bestowed upon them by the mission's success. The need for illusion is as a structural necessity - if one erases the illusion, the reality is lost."

"The artifice of illusions is shaped by the dreamer's need to return to reality. At some point the deception ends and one is confronted by that which is Real. One's excitement at the artifice is proportional to one's roots in the Real."