Home The Return

In the current bleak, hollow and artificial everyday existence, an urge for escape manifests itself early in the minds of those who crave for something more than the mere functioning for the shallowest of reasons, like material gain, social acceptance and praise based on it. This escape doesn't begin immediately, but several stages of behaviour and thought must be passed first, and that escape and going beyond is only the beginning of the journey.

It is well known that the inborn character and affinities, not just the social environment and parental raising, greatly contribute to the person's mindset. Although it is very rare, even in the most closed and totalitarian societies with the almost complete blocking of the outside information dissidents appeared with their own independently formed outlook that clashed with the official doctrine. Those originators and creators always faced the ridicule and persecution of the crowd, which was unable to comprehend the content in their words. This will always happen, because it is reasonable that the vast majority of people, who are of average, or in the current times mostly below average intelligence, cannot understand the brilliant mind of those people (although there were some exceptions, most notably in classical music, whose abstract nature could stir something high even in the common person).

These people felt alienated and bewildered in their surroundings and started to question the function and meaning of it, thus beginning to shake off their adopted, or programmed beliefs. Having found little or no sense in them at all, they began the passage through the stage of inner struggle, namely depression and pessimism, which consumed many of them so that they either surrendered and returned to the society, thus resuming their painful and unfulfilled existence always regretting for the passed opportunities, or took the extreme step of suicide.

Among the crowd there are those who have surrendered and thrown away their potential.

Those who have not surrendered or quit life realized that they must fight and further advance themselves to go above the mere understanding of the flaws in the society and try to do something about them, instead of continuing to moan and groan while feeling superior, thus beginning the next stage of self improvement, i.e. freeing themselves from the cages of their societies.

The next stage of self improvement consists of acquiring the past wisdom that is closely connected to the eternal truths in life, which can apply in any age. This wisdom serves as a firm foundation for the potential gaining of knowledge that is even further connected or related to those truths, or in another words, they are moving closer to the light of the exit.

The next stage is the hardest, as it involves going beyond, or actual leaving the cave and its wall of shadows, that is in our mind, and reaching the exit, the World of Ideas, as Plato argued in his famous allegory of the cave. This absorption of those ideas means seeing the light at the exit, but the journey has not finished, because that abstract knowledge can be gained in different forms, so that the intensity of light affects the person in different ways and they must also return with it to the real world.

There were those who had seen too much of those terrifyingly sublime vistas of knowledge, as H.P. Lovecraft would have said, that their mind can handle, and were incinerated by the light, so they returned insane, unable to apply those ideas to the real world. These people became the insane and lost shells of their former potential which was ruined, so they were quickly forgotten.

The smartest man ever was called insane and ridiculous by the crowd which was five centuries behind him.

There were those who had gained the ideas, saw the light, but never wanted to return to the considerably less perfect world of shadows, so they chose to remove themselves from the world, one way or the other, in an attempt to stay in the light forever, which is impossible for a human being. These people were selfish to partake in the hard task of advancing and enriching humanity and completely isolated themselves from the world, so all of those high ideas were useless, their purpose and realization locked and trapped in those minds.

And yet there were those, the greatest minds of humanity, who absorbed the knowledge which was adequate for their mind, so that they returned from the light to the darkness of the cave, which they tried to illuminate or brighten it a little with their ideas. History remembers only these people, because they brought something valuable with them. The journey of these men was complete, but the brightening of the cave, or the application of those ideas, was another matter. In many cases the world felt threatened by such ideas which could disrupt their common, unimaginative and familiar existence and beliefs, so that the returned bearers of wisdom were met by the mob with ridicule, wrath, persecution (Aristotle, Galileo Galilee, Leonardo da Vinci,) and many of them were executed as heretics (Socrates, Giordano Bruno and many others with their names erased from history). They had to endure many difficulties and overcome many obstacles, and many of them had a somewhat bitter feeling that they would never receive any rightfully deserved gratitude and praise, and that the world could be ready to comprehend their ideas only long after their death (because only few of them were recognized during their lifetime). Their ideas, however, persisted and were eventually acknowledged because those ideas were successfully applied and the meaningful effects on the world they produced are still visible today.

These are the stages of the journey for transcendental ideas that the strong and intelligent people must return with and apply them to the world, and any person intelligent enough to embark on it will have to overcome many internal and external obstacles to be recognized as the true contributor to the world as a whole, thus being truly immortalized in the mind of the humanity.

May 23, 2007


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