Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: There is a tendency humans have, to treat the quality of humanity as something more than it is. This often translates to treating humans as an absolute. The word humane, for example, which we hold to have moral meaning etymologically merely refers to us and, with the language used, carries unfortunate connotations towards the… inhumane and the inhuman as being lesser. This excerpt tackles the issue of a rather simple notion – humans are real, right?
We naturally use our own frame of reference to calibrate our perception. Warmth and cold spring from our perception of temperature. But would they be equally valid from a different perspective? Would a sun dweller care for our human idea of the sun’s scalding heat at the height of summer days?
We understand this is the nature of Masks. We each have our own, subject to a unique frame of reference born from the nigh irreproducible qualia of our lives.
Yet with one thing, we seek to set an objective quantity for the feature of existing within reality — the ousia of the gestalt.
What basis do we have for this assumption? Who is to say that our pathetic existence within a constrained sliver of time and space feels real for the great immanities? That for these vast beings we are not but ghosts, barely there, transparent and fleeting?
It feels that we might be deceiving ourselves, committing the sin of thrusting our Mask upon others. We may be, even in the strictest physical sense, less real than the great and vast bodies and minds birthed by the Cosmos. And in turn, they are but ghosts temporarily weaved from the titan flesh of Elder Gods.
The bottom, theoretical boundary for ousia represents chaos, so perfect, so absolute that it bears the potential to spawn limitless universes. And yet we hold our existence as the complement of that? Do we see ourself as the Cosmic counterbalance to what was once called the Eyn Sof?
Should we not cast our eyes at the immanities… no, the Elder Gods as akin to that? Entities of the hyperreal whose bodies weave the fabric of reality. Or will we insist that somehow, these great existences are less real than we are?
Mankind should approach its existence in the Cosmos with humility. We are young, weak, inexperienced. Let us not, as Masters, allow ourselves the same mistakes we see in the initiates.
Esoteric Musings... 