Australia: Sydney
Land of Prisons
Sydney is a metropolis that sprawls into untamed lands with its endless suburbs and snaking streets. From beaches to the mountains, the city ensnares all in between in its material grasp. This manufactured landscape was once virgin soil, free from the grips of modern man. The aboriginals had inhabited this space for over 30,000 years with minimal degradation of nature. It was a reverential symbiosis, and due to that, the aboriginals were genuinely free.
In 1788, the first fleet of convicts washed upon the shores of the region now known as Sydney. These vile and dangerous men were exiled from the rest of the British empire. They were forced to sail to the ends of the earth and disappear into a hostile world. For almost seventy years, Sydney was a prison colony. However, all of that changed after gold was discovered in the 1850s. Opportunists voyaged from across the globe to tap into the natural reserves of the land. Sydney transformed from a prison into a thriving city built upon gold. The remnants of the gold rush are still evident here today in that the city is one of the most expensive in the world. It seems that it is impossible to shed the past in modernity, no matter how hard a nation tries.
What once was still remains. Sydney is not just a city built on gold, but it remains a prison. The shackles of modernity are of a more subtle construct. The cells are more extensive, the movement freer, and the perception is different. The layers of control have stacked atop one another until the reality of the system is hard to unravel. Buried deep below the city are the same substrates that built the prisons, the same history that formed the present. We are enslaved to the truth of our past. That past goes deeper than the prisons we make for ourselves. Our minds are our prison, and our cities and societies are built upon that base. Sydney was an example of this abstraction in action.
We have always been controlled by unknown forces, our subconscious mind, our primitive instincts. Those same foundational elements of abstraction are magnified within our societies, refining, and disappearing into a new layer of abstraction. The truth is buried deeper and deeper. It is not the evil of a tyrant or the conspiracy of society that built the system, it is within all of us. Deep down, we know this. Deep down, we try to run away from the truth as it tries to catch up with us. What if we turned and faced it? What if we mastered what we feared — ourselves. Not by being “mindful” and “mediating,” which is yet another layer of abstraction. We must go into the truth of our past and comprehend the substrate in which our minds formed. Mindfulness might as well be mindlessness: avoid those thoughts that plague your mind, clear your head, “be in the now” — more like “be in denial.” Your thoughts and your mind were grown in a soil that is not yet understood. Instead of suppressing those primitive urges, those subconscious gut feelings, we need to embrace and understand them. We do not need to become free from our instincts and delete them, they are us. The only way to free ourselves from the shackles that our minds have built is to find the key buried in our past. Unless we can do it for ourselves, we will not be able to do it in our society.
Beasts of the Night
The nightclub entrance is a prolonged hallway that leads from the sidewalk deep into the belly of the beast. After the sentry analyzes credentials, you must journey in as the guttural sounds pulse through attenuated walls. Blasts of humid air blow past filled with a heaviness that carries the smell of perspiration. Walking down the corridor is an act of sacrifice. You cannot see what lies within, but they embrace whatever may come.
The blast of air is the eructation of the beast who has eaten yet another spirit. The rank smell grows fouler with every step until the terror reveals itself. The cavernous room is dark, and the floor is mucilaginous. Each step grasps your feet with spilled intoxicants from others that were sacrificed. The beast had defiled the essence of so many, addicted them to a soulless nature.
Standing to the side in observation, one sees the lack of depth embodied here. All are shells, corrupted by the drink, betrayed by its promise of pleasure. These people are lost, swimming in a sea of loneliness, shedding their true selves to become one with the collective. They sway back and forth as a mass of bodies. Together, they are a different life form, entirely inhuman. Is there a point in which that soul is lost in the deluge of liquor? For those who are cursed to see the world for how it is, stomaching this odd behavior only lasts for a few moments.
There is absolutely no meaning in this place. It does more than consumes meaning; it obliterates it. At least if it was consumed, it has the potential to be recycled. This place pulverizes it into a fine powder that blows away in a balmy wind, never to be seen again. What is left of these people at the break of the next day? How do they regain that meaning which is lost here?
The conclusion after trekking out of the beast and into the night is that this place is a void. The payment for entry is your hard-earned meaning. It is a currency that is attained over a lifetime, and these places convert it to exhaust faster than oil can be burned. No wonder the world is at a loss to find meaning. They are sacrificing it with reckless abandon as the clock ticks away into early morning.
Trying to determine when this began, one may look at the drug-induced euphoria of the 1970s. This free and drug-filled movement was a time of expression, identity, and destruction. Sure the past was also afflicted with these same devices, but I would say it was of lesser intensity. The masses rose from impoverished lives, and after several decades of structure and meaning, it all came crashing down. We cannot be happy with what we have. We must destroy it and create a new reality. The remnants of that time are a world that has burned away meaning for unfettered pleasures in a belief that life should be experienced to the fullest. That raises a grand question: what is life and what determines fullness? Is it endless pleasure, communal living, late nights out, and thin relationships — or is it something more? Was the eradication of virtue the destruction of meaning?
Deep down in the hearts of the world, there must be a yearning for truth. Yet at every step, it is burned away in the night and congealed into a hollow mask. Beyond the guise is a soul searching for meaning, but to the external world, it still embodies a thin reality. This is where the veil is constructed, and all willingly step behind it. The veil promises safety from the reality of truth. The truth is profoundly mystifying and perilous. One would rather exist behind the veil then risk the truth, but at what point does that destroy the soul? What happens when life has been lived behind a mask and truth erupts with destructive force. The later in life this eruption takes place, the more risk there is for permanent damage to the psyche. The rectification of this dissonance is vital for the emergence of higher consciousness. Before this, life is meaningless, and we are controlled by our primitive desires. So the nihilists are right in that regard. However, after the integration of truth and virtue within oneself, meaning blooms like a flower in a field of ashes. Nihilism is overtaken by a wave of color. How can one voyage through this treacherous transformation and emerge intact?
