Around deceptive horizons

So where is the truth? In the middle, as they usually say? But it is impossible to locate this middle, it is a dead zone. When passing through it, an individual dissolves in the crowd and loses his identity. We can call this crowd a progressive mankind or a band of marauders or public opinion - it remains equally pointless.

...Should we look for truth in individualism, in a situation when a man opposes himself to the crowd? He tries to feel the lines of force emanating from his undiscovered center, to figure out the idea of his being and to orientate his life activity according to it. But whatever orientation he chooses, he would in any case have to kill the marionette in himself and to break all his contacts with the crowd by giving up common desires and purposes and alienating himself from cultural and scientific dogmas in spite of their obviousness. It is necessary to take a heroic decision because a society as well as the devil does not forgive half-conformism and relative corruptibility. This implies a search for inner truth, the frightening path of a lonely mystic.

...The permanent fear of losing something and the permanent desire to acquire something dictate the conformist manner of behavior because fear and desire characterize the lie in all its variations. These emotions make us act. Action. An existential category which has completely replaced relaxed reflection and contemplation . The world is no longer a landscape, it is a "surrounding reality", a methodical fuss, a factory. Of course, the factor of time acquires a deadly aggressiveness, time is always lacking, we have "no time" to think even about our recent past or about our nearest future.

...The evolution of public consciousness, the dialectical development of scientific ideas, the gradual transition from lower to higher perfection - is an illusion and a self-deception. Epochs, social agglomerations, scientific, political and cultural systems are bound by a complex counterpoint, they are flashing in the invisible and vanishing into it. In such a situation we cannot think of truth as of something constant and reliable, and there is no reason to look for support in the past.

...Doubt is the climate within which we exist. The emanation of mistrust comes from ourselves because we don't believe that our "self" - the spirit, the soul and the body - is a unity which is organized irrationally, which is closed and open at the same time. We suppose that we should rush to a doctor when having a symptoms of illness, ask for advice when experiencing a difficult situation. In short, we think that someone else would be able to cure us, to teach us and to open for us the secret of life and death. However, we don't feel like trusting this someone. Having no axis for an individual being we flounder in commonly accepted waves and listen to the beat of this unquiet sea out there, in loneliness.

(from the article "Around deceptive horizons", 1996)

1996, Eugeni Golovin