**Searching for Belief** to progress our species you need a direction because how else could you define progression? we say **_health_**, **_well-being_**, **_peace_**, **_prosperity_**… but I don’t believe in those because to what end? We want health for what? For well-being. And well-being for what? For peace. And peace for what? For prosperity. And prosperity for what? Health. It’s circular. It eats itself. We **_explore_** and for what? Because we **_do_**? Is that enough? Now it seems that it is not because the “edge” is invisible to us. We don’t commune with the unknown anymore. As things have been explained away and abstracted beyond our tactile senses more and more the activation energy required to catalyze wonder has grown super-linearly. **We have nothing to touch that smells of mystery**.  the most critical problem of our time by far is that of **_belief_**.  we killed God and were told we could stand in his place {together} as humans. But we can’t self-organize without God so the individual is tasked to swallow the world. The individual must **_become_** God. Everything else is too transient. But the individual **_cannot_** become God because God is connection. Ultimate connection. And the individual has nowhere to extend itself to become ultimate connection, because **_to consume is not to connect_**. and curiosity is simply not enough. You cannot be curious if you cannot see the unknown! You know everything you could ask is something you can resolve immediately {on the internet}. The unknown only arrives to us in randomness now. Nothing to interrogate. We become obsessed with gambling our fate because Randomness is the easiest unknown to feel. We wait until a cataclysmic life event rocks us because our response will be another edge of mystery. The unknowns at the boundaries of the “self" even reduces as you learn more and more that people have traversed the same path as you in multitudes and you have their records to supplant your own process. Why would you even look? And for what? We know that we can never become God and so the void will never be filled _that_ way. Now to get to the edge of mystery you have to climb a mountain higher than anyone. You cannot walk to the edge of the village to find darkness anymore. You have to seek the unknown intentionally. we’re placated by all of this. Pacified. Left with only Control as the lever we can pull. Because if we MANUFACTURE mystery we have already nullified its force. Mystery is not knowing where the darkness ends. If we put a fence around a forest and call **_that_** the unknown or the edge or the area to explore, then we have killed the critical aspect of the journey. So randomness remains. But what of randomness? Is it real? It’s only a measure of our ignorance. You follow cause and effect down to the quantum level and even there we aren’t sure where there could be an origin for it. yes, one could abandon this whole line of inquiry and seek to control but that’s all we’re doing if we don’t have belief. And I think some people do have belief, but I don’t know where they get it. If you operate from belief you are Holy and if not you are an agent of Control. **You have to imagine Utopia and it has to be a real one**, at least implicitly. Not the one you are given. No chrome buildings and flying cars. It has to be real Utopia. But what underpins the fabric of this Utopia? What is the core assumption at the heart of it? That is the critical question. We will simply keep whittling things into the shape of God until we burn that yet again and eventually, as is put so precisely in The World Goes On: Oblivion. The only chance at dissolution and a reunion with the infinite: Oblivion.