The Glaucoma of Western Epistemology

What is in the black space? Something? Or nothing?

I want to post another thought about the West's metanarrative, this time demonstrating why a civilization that reveres both progressivism and knowledge inevitably loses sight of the higher modes of being. This gradual narrowing of intellectual vision, much like the tunnel vision of glaucoma, proceeds on a linguistic, pedagogical basis, and leads to a kind of nihilism that characterizes today's treatment of knowledge.

• Assuming a higher reality exists, we humans cannot express everything, but must appreciate higher existences as things beyond our complete grasp.
• In order to situate the abstract ideas in our intellect and come to a greater appreciation of them, however, many religions and thinkers have licitly applied rational terms, analogies, and words to these ineffable realities.
• Those who learn about higher reality through these words, and properly understand the greater mystery behind them, will teach others using the same words, that they may understand higher reality in the same way.
• However, those who misunderstand these words by misunderstanding the idea behind them will explain what he understands in different words, to suit the meaning of the faulty idea.
• These new words, no longer pointing to the higher reality that the traditional words did, necessarily reduces their meaning to something less than before.
• Between the traditional words and the innovated words, the latter will be accepted more widely and more quickly, because they are more comprehensible (although less true) than the former.
• The repetition of this phenomenon initiates a gradual descent of terms into concreteness and meaninglessness, bringing reality itself down with it.
• The higher realities, once signified by the traditional words of pedagogy, are now empty, black, peripheral spaces that inspire an inevitable nihilism.

Perhaps this is why the Bible is a story. A story is an ultra-simplified unit that cannot be explained in a more comprehensible way than itself. Its meaning, therefore, survives the ages, and may point everyone to the greatest ideas in a universally accessible way.