The postmodern world where reality is only a social construct
Somehow atheism (anti-Christianity) morphed into anti-religiousism and with it a dangerous fall into nihilism. Here, I become a problem for myself in that I don’t have any identity other than clinging to this physical body and its sensory experiences (mainly sexual). This problem is further highlighted by the conclusion of Richard Rorty:
“Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are” (From Logic to Language to Play, 1986).
This view lands us in the postmodern world where reality is only a social construct including even the intuitive wisdom of the Buddhas. But this view, from a Buddhist perspective, is really saying that we have found no absolute truth with our five senses nor the sixth, which is our theoretical imagination.
Our choice of how we look for truth has brought us finally to nihilism. But in this failed journey we have never trusted intuition. We gave that up very early with the rise of the modern age. We turned our back on intuition and sought, instead, technology. But our technology has only amplified our own immaturity even our decent into nihilism.
While our theoretical imagination has yet to find absolute truth, but is still looking, our everyday imagination has become a kind of fantasy world where there are no restraints or morality. This anchoring of our identity in the sixth sense or imagination is certainly not without some serious dangers. It turns into a kind of magical thinking even denying the biological facts of gender.
Even the divide between sanity and insanity becomes blurred. We cannot tell one from the other. If as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, then the line between sanity and insanity also cuts through the human heart. We have yet to play out our imagination and find its limits. Right now it is open to exploration and with that opening we are subject to many delusions.
