Time to summarize where the series on freedom has gone up till now.

The only concern of these essays is the restoration of the earth’s health.

But how can something as pathetic as an essay contribute to the healing of the earth? The same way any other action performed whole-heartedly contributes, the same way any white blood cell encountering a virus contributes to the healing of the whole population: By realizing and metabolizing the world’s poisons as they circulate within this holograph of the whole, called me. By being an example of healing, by facing my diseased self honestly, allowing the old patterns of identification to die, as they should have died thousands of years ago, before the disease suppurated.

Honesty is the painful act of healing. It’s also the most rebellious act one can undertake in a deceitful world.

This isn’t about learning to play the violin while the world burns. None of these essays are about personal advancement or personal adjustments to a world in its death throes. Those concerns make me sick. I mean “sick” as an accurate metaphor, because the world’s sickness is rooted in a frame of mind that is selfish and short-sighted. We are heading towards extinction from too much personal concern.

The time has come to irradiate with honesty the virus of the literal conception of our small, alienated Selves.

And so that was the starting point – an introduction to the Ringmaster. This recognition of the fictional nature of the speaker, writer and Self (the little voice in the head) is a declaration of freedom from the chains of who we think we are. There is no overseer, no organizer in chief, there is only a perpetual performance of one such dramatic persona after another.

The innocent human body is subjected to the momentum of thousands of years of insane drama, picking up the scripts dropped on us by the previous actors.

The time has come for the literal conception of our selves to die.

Selves are like skin cells – we need to shed our skins.

Identity is tied too tightly to fictions called “free will” and “free choice.” This is where the second essay in the series picked up. There is freedom, but it comes in the absence of choice and will. Freedom is the unanticipated, unscripted appearance of honesty.

Honesty is never what we choose or want. It illuminates what we try to hide. It smashes the false idols of hypocritical ideals, the illusions of free will and personal choice, the lies of conclusive truth and dogma. It negates the script that traps us in who we think we are.

Hence, the third essay in this series was a metaphoric performance of how and why we feel obliged to resume the role of our Selves, culturally and personally, on a daily and generational basis — how this momentum of historical lies and tribal dramas has overrun us, as if there were a predatory demon writing the scripts of our lives.

The fourth essay digs at the central illusion that keeps us tied to the demonic scripts – seeing everything as a dogmatic argument between fact and fiction, rather than as an honest or dishonest fiction. Moving into a metaphoric perspective frees us from the hall of mirrors that entraps intelligence in competing illusions of truth.

And this allows us (in the fifth essay) to examine our situation without the blinders of a normalizing optimism. If we can’t recognize our situation as abnormally sick, then empathy is lacking, and health becomes impossible. Without empathy for our situation, we can’t heal. Only a recognition of the horrors of our entrapment ends the blockade against empathy, freeing us from the automated reflex of punishment and self-hatred that is scripted by the devil himself.

Like honesty, empathy also arrives from nowhere, unconditionally, without logical or material causation, pitying the human being driven mad by their blind devotion to a demonic will that sucks the human being dry, until it is almost a zombie.

We can’t intentionally will ourselves to be empathetic. We can’t choose empathy. But in being indefensibly honest about the depths of our sickness (refusing to normalize our situation), empathy is there.

Honesty itself is an act of empathy (and rebellion from the devil).

In this culture we are encouraged to exchange love for loyalty, clinging to manipulative liars as our only teat of belonging, pretending to be above pain by inflicting it on others, mistaking brutality for bravery. Fascism keeps rearing its head because fascism is the only refuge of lifeless, sensation-seeking, self-hating zombies.

The rebellion from the devil and his automated legions starts here, with honesty and empathy. It’s the rebellion of the earth itself, from this tendency towards a mechanical conclusion to human potential. A rebellion of love.

[Also recommend Tony Dias’s latest essay: “When the World Died”]