Kihō no Monogatari

A morning talk, as given by Marelle.

Civilization, fundamentally, separates the true from the false.

That's not to say that everyone in a frame agrees on everything. Of course people argue all the time, and much profit is made on conflicts of perspective.

But underneath those peaks of disagreement is an iceberg of shared assumptions that no one notices because that's just "how the world works".

Assumptions about what's true, and what's false. How much things should cost. What has value. What someone deserves. What is normal, what is just.

You might think that, out here in the wastes, we're not defined by civilization. But it's not something you can escape by just walking. We can't but live in relation to civilization.

Some of this is good. Without civilization we wouldn't have medicines, we wouldn't have screws, clean water would be harder to come by.

Some of it is unhelpful. We bring our old angers, our unhealthy desires, our biases. And we live amidst others' trash.

And we bring these assumptions of true and false with us, too. They're tied in with the way we think.

They're baked into our stories.

We come from different places, from different frames. That helps, some.

Yet how can we escape the duality of true and false if we're still entangled in the places we came from?

But thinking of it as an escape is wrong. Fleeing something is just chasing a contrast.

And pursuing nonduality in these terms is like asking a stone to fly.