The Obelisk

<p>No systematic ideation seems able to measure the universe—a one-to-one map even of the subjective world can probably only be achieved in non-ideational states. Nothing can be posited—&quot;nevertheless, it moves.&quot;&lt;br /&gt; <br />&amp;nbsp;&lt;br /&gt; <br />Something comes into cognition, and consciousness attempts to structure it. This structure is then taken for the bedrock of reality, and applied as a mappa mundi—first as language, then as ideology inherent in language. These language/ideology complexes tend to become orthodoxies. For example, since the Enlightenment it has been considered indisputable that only one mode of consciousness is fully real; we might call it the consciousness that &quot;falsifies&quot;—i.e., that verifies science as true. Before the Enlightenment other orthodoxies held sway and valued other forms of consciousness or cognition. We could sum up these earlier orthodoxies under the rubrics of God and Nature, and perhaps associate them with the Neolithic and Paleolithic, respectively. Although these worldviews retain some adherents they have been archaeologically submerged, so to speak, by &quot;Universal Reason&quot;. The Enlightenment coincides with the first determined breakthrough into scientific instrumentality and the &quot;conquest of Nature&quot;; God survives the onslaught for another century but finally (after a deathbed scene of positively operatic length) succumbs around 1899. Nature is silent; God is dead. Ideology is rational and scientific; the dark ages are over. If we can say that the 18th century brought us the betrayal of Nature, and the 19th century the betrayal of God, then the 20th century has certainly produced the betrayal of (and by) ideology. Enlightenment Rationalism and its offshoot/rival Dialectical Materialism have expired and gone to heaven and left us &quot;dans la merde&quot; (as the dying Gurdjieff told his disciples), stuck in the mire of a material world reduced to the cruel abstraction of exchange and dedicated only to its own self-defacement and disappearance.</p>