And so the fire came to purge the wild forest, a natural check to its unkempt growth.

The problem lies with our beginning. Man’s entrance into this world is not simply limited to the moment of his birth. There is more than one beginning, marked by the moment of his conception, his exodus from the womb and, also, the arising of his mind. For the birth of his psychological identity happens many years after his physical one. The boy begins as a highly emotional animal and slowly imitates the mannerisms which condition him gradually to become a tamed human being, able to send and receive thoughts and ideas by way of words. Yet this unfolding, this development, denies him an initial moment where he acknowledges it as a significant milestone. Nor does he stop for a second to consider it strange that, here and now, something has fundamentally changed within his being.

This lack of consciousness is by design and it penetrates his every manifestation. From the moment of his arising onto this earth, he has been assimilating every fabric of detail in order to become, as it were, not an individual but rather a cloned persona which accords nicely with the decorations of the surrounding culture. Our entire life can reach its end without our ever having realized that self-consciousness is by all accounts an optional phenomenon. There is no law of nature which compels a man to become aware of himself and to question the rudiments of what he and everything else is, or the validity of what he has been led to believe. A myriad of other pursuits, interests and ambitions have been implanted by rote and repetition, so that he falls under the sway of their influence for the majority of his waking hours.

“When the forest grows too wild, a cleansing fire is only natural.” We must actively desire to rid ourselves of superficial tastes and wants, as many as possible, in order to begin from something of a clean slate which more or less grants us the opportunity to find out what it is exactly that we genuinely want from life. In nature, it comes of itself. For an individual, it must be an intentional and relatively conscious decision. In every moment there will be a choice to go with the flow of what you have become or pause the impulse as soon as possible in order to begin stealing time from that part of you which is merely clothing. There is a great degree of contentment that might be had if that clothing were made thin, light and perhaps one day shed altogether and dropped to the floor by some grand miracle. That would be a worthwhile pursuit for the honest and simple infant still alive within us.