Though the evidence is all around, and though the "engines" of the Beast throb and shudder everlastingly, the truth goes undetected by the hylic "Everymen" whose rapid arrival to, and departure from, the theatre of time and space prevents clear insight into the workings of the well-oiled machinery which operates behind the "Wheel of Samsara" (existence). Moreover, these erstwhile actors, caught in their mundane roles, perform better when they believe that they think with the mind, not for it. They offer their services in exchange for access to, and receipt of, the many endowments and powers that intoxicate their waking and sleeping dreams. Through its colossal adventure, the collective mind rewards those who serve its purpose, demoting, and conspiring against those who do not, or will not. It has fashioned both heavens and hells for this express purpose. The "Puppet-Master" covets those individual minds who can assist it in its super-secret agenda, its devouring of experience and framing of the world into its own monstrous likeness. The pawns who are recruited to assist in this conquest rarely comprehend what lies behind their personal ardors, their mistakes and discoveries, their rise and fall, or suspect that they are participants in a timeless transaction, mere bubbling test-tubes in a vast unholy laboratory, their personal value lying solely in their designated functions, and not in their selfhood. In the laboratory of the Beast, and in the social hive, we have our assigned duties to carry out, duties which are performed better when we believe ourselves to be operating under our own volition. Our periodic failures, during the vast experiment, are due to our supposed nemesis ignorance, while our periodic successes are, in total, our ticket to supposed salvation and enlightenment. This is the life-act which enslaves ephemerals and eternals, angels and devils all.

The Escher- or Dali-Fools, who have looked behind the god-game, and who presume to speak or teach the truth do so at their own peril. Far from being rewarded or exalted, they are vilified, and branded "Renegade." Every attempt is made to silence their audacious voices, and confound their antinomian philosophy. They are the cracked test-tubes, or corrupted data files, to be trashed and deleted. The Beast attributes little actual value to the problematic individual, only to the species. It may experience the occasional "failure" on the ontological (individual) front, but the plaque of its phylogenetic (collective, historical) success is proudly posed above its penthouse desk, so to speak. Unhindered by the brave resistance and resignation of foolish iconoclasts, the mighty wheels of the demiurge relentlessly grind on. Slowly, through its particular form of osmosis, the worm-like mind ingests the stuff of reality, reducing it to processed dust in its "dark satanic mills." All the long while, during its Sisyphean Labor, the ego-tyrant fails to realize that the phenomena which it imagines as "external" and antithetical to itself is really an apparition, or epiphenomena, of its own convoluted processes and that, in its efforts to dominate matter, it has succeeded only in further enslaving itself. Its window to the world turns out to be a mirror. In Blake's terminology, Urizen's chains are his necklaces.



The world, and its apparent content, is an image within our own minds that we condition ourselves to believe is an external reality. The principle incarnate architects and exponents of this lie enjoy titles like "philosopher," or "scientist," but they neither love wisdom, nor see further than their own perplexity, their own "Newtonian Sleep." The Fool is one who awakens to this paradox. He is awakened after hearing the ambient pulse and whirl made by the giant machinery of the omnipresent mind-game, the all-pervading, relentless and terrible rhythm unheard by those intentionally deafened by the clamor of thoughts, words, ideals and deeds. Upon his awakening, the Sage-Fool arrives at the peripheral wall which stands between the real and the unreal. He sits down in its shadow and remains silent, listening to it. There he puts an end to his struggle, his desires to own, command, understand or prize that which is unreal. The unreal, by being unreal, eludes ownership. It cannot be possessed, known, held or even destroyed. Only the mind which conjures the unreal, and desires it, can be silenced. The ego which adamantly and feverishly attempts, incarnation after incarnation, to find the world, and not its own countenance, framed in its ancient mental mirror, must eventually smash the glass, and end its vain quest, in order to really experience the nameless and everlasting Tao.