In discussion with a true believer I asserted that there is no more shame associated with the Western tradition than with others. That indeed this analytical mindset was one that enables the person to understand the viewpoint of another yet maintain their sense of being within that analytical framework. Other frames, other traditions but not all, cannot understand the other’s position as their own has yet to collapse. Our tradition emerges from collapse. The collapse of an ordered cosmos, the collapse of the order at the very least. The collapse of the soul perhaps. The collapse of the ego. Even the disappearance of heroic embodiment in favour of celebrity. It is the recognition of the possibility of collapse, its inevitability having already once happened, that forms the very freedom necessary to rebuild in a materially profound fashion, elements of the world which surround us. The heroic and true believer negates all this through a willingness to self-sacrifice, death not feared and it is true that death cannot be avoided. And it is true that the desire to maintain one’s eyesight after the onset of a debilitating eye disease may well be a desire to avoid that death. Death is inevitable but what we try to avoid is not the inevitable but things that are markedly evitable: high mortality rates in childbirth, frequent insurgencies of painful ways of dying. We do not play God. But God does not play God. God doesn’t play at all. We play that being people. That is what we are, scrawled out of the mud. A material. Consciousness as material.