Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.
[Fear researcher] Huberman decides to paraphrase the great horror writer Stephen King: Fear has a lot to do with time frames. Before the event, a person experiences the dread of anticipation; during the event, there’s terror when they’re helpless in the moment; and after it’s over, a person remembers the experience as horror.
As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams. We cannot see it; we can only see into it, with suspicions, hunches, intuitions, feelings. It is a two-dimensional realm with no more—and no less—substance than words, feelings, thoughts, reflections.
We call consciousness (literally, as we have seen, “to know with myself) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic “being one” is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.
