text: Extinction. There’s a certain finality to the word, that summons a primordial sense of dread and doom to the core of our being. It means the end of a species. Not just the happenstance death of a few individuals you don’t even know, but the final, irreversible end of an entire world population of a species, meaning there would never be such a life form ever again. Uniqueness, lost forever due to the very trait that made it so special in the first place. Extinction is happening all the time. It didn’t just happen to the dinosaurs and it doesn’t just happen in sci-fi movies. It’s probably happening right now, to some species we don’t even know exists, likely a tiny bacteria living in the depths of Earth’s oceans. A tiny bacteria. A badass warrior that we all owe our lives to, for kick-starting our evolution and for terraforming Earth into a life-sustaining planet. But a bacteria is not a dolphin or an elephant, so nobody cares. You can’t take a picture with a bacteria and post it on social media. You can’t even see it with your naked eyes and yet the combined mass of all the bacteria on Earth heavily outweighs the mass of every other animal and plant that you can see. Next to the sun and the elements, the bacteria is the first link in the food chain. That precious dolphin or elephant would never have existed if the bacteria was removed. Yet humans pretend otherwise. There’ve been major extinctions in the past, five big ones, to be precise. One nearly destroyed all life on the planet. Another killed the ruling class and gave room for us to evolve. Extinction is not a bad word. Nor is it a good one. It is a tool of nature and just like any tool, it can either destroy or create. Nature can give life and nature can take life away. The degree to which we care about that life is the degree to which it either promotes or threatens our survival. Would you care if a nameless bacteria died in an ocean? Even if it’s responsible for making your atmosphere breathable, even if it provides food for everything above it? What if your pet’s species went extinct? Would you care? What if you go extinct? The answers are tied to your survival, either physical, emotional, or intellectual. You care only as long as it helps you, by either keeping you alive or making you feel good about yourself. You don’t truly care for other life, because selfishness is genetically encoded in your DNA. Don’t believe me? Do you cry when your skin cells die? Each of them is a living entity, but do you mourn when one of the billions of cells that comprise your body dies? Do you even notice it? That’s how selfish you are. And it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. All life is made that way - that’s what life is . At least, what we mean by ‘biological organism’. Realize that you could not be alive if you were selfless. If your cells would be equally accepting of all other organisms, from the bacteria in the sea to the elephant in the zoo, your body would fall apart and become food to sustain them. You’d love them so much you’d give your whole being to them, instead of the one dollar you pay monthly for a preservation cause. So don’t pretend you’re selfless. Don’t pretend you care. Admit your selfishness to yourself for that is the only path on which genuine compassion can begin. Only if you accept the selfish creature that you are, accept it for what it is, can you begin to develop true compassion. And only then can you start taking care of the most endangered species on the planet. Do you know what that species is? It’s you. Homo Sapiens Nescium. The unconscious human. You’re simultaneously the greatest danger to the universe as well as its greatest gift. And you are facing extinction. No black hole, no big rip, or other doom theory for the universe can come close to the destructive power of your selfish ego. And no star forgery, big bang, or any other creation theory carries more compassion and love than your heart is capable of. But the problem is that you’re unconscious. Your ego rules and your heart is enslaved to your mind. This is the reason why you are the most endangered species and why you’ll go extinct if you continue on this path. No other life form, as far as we know it, has an ego to such a degree that we do - it’s actually a gift, but we’ve turned it into a curse. You see, the unconscious ‘common’ man is endangered. He is destroying his world, his race, his life. He lets others dictate his thoughts and feelings, he is a sheep, a puppet. And what's worse, he has convinced himself that he is not controlled by others, that the things he values are the products of his own flawless and uncorrupted reasoning. The unconscious man is the devil, his unconsciousness the very vehicle of evil. For in his ignorance, which he has interpreted as knowing and understanding, he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. He believes what he has been told blindly, like a naive little child who has no experience of the world. He believes in the answers his mind provides for him and he interprets the world based not on what he perceives with his senses, but based on what he thinks he perceives with his sense. The unconscious man lives in augmented reality, which he calls his life, the only reality that he thinks is true and real. He is much like a character in a video game, unaware of the fact that his existence is a figment of imagination of a much higher being. You are a figment of your own imagination. You’ve never met yourself, all you’ve seen is the person who your mind thinks you are. Homo Sapiens Nescium. The one that has problems in life. The one that wants things, but cannot get them. The one that suffers and is pained by existence, while joy and happiness seem like foreign myths. The unconscious condition of Homo Sapiens Nescium is by far the worst pandemic ever to hit humanity. It claims lives in the billions . Lives that could be, lives of fulfilled dreams and joy and peace. Harmony with oneself and with the world. An united humanity, where hate, selfishness and suffering are reserved for works of fiction. That’s what the unconsciousness pandemic claims, among other things. Luckily, the world is changing. It has been changing for a long time, quietly, from generation to generation, one lifetime at a time, one individual’s choice after another. Now, the change is beginning to become noticeable. The momentum has started picking up the pace. A new kind of man is emerging, a conscious man. A growing man, one that realizes he doesn’t know himself and he does everything he can to find himself. A self-actualizing man. A hero. This man is nothing new, for he had existed for just as long as the unconscious man did. But never before has the world been so connected as it is today, never before in history did the conscious man have access to communicate his message with so many unconscious people. This new man threatens the unconscious man, but not in a hostile or aggressive way. He threatens him simply by existing, for he shows the unconscious man his deepest flaws and failings of reason. The new man is searching for a solution, while the unconscious man believes he already has it - while in truth, he does not. The unconscious man has only fooled himself into thinking that he does. And it is this foolishness that will ultimately cause his extinction. If he does not begin to realize that he doesn’t know himself or the world, the unconscious man will perish. He will be nothing more than a farm animal, docile and obedient, serving to drive the dreams of others with his cheap labor and inability to perceive a different possibility for himself. And this is how it should be - the unconscious man should die. He should not be preserved, just as cancer tissue should not be allowed to spread through the body. He should be studied and given full attention to, for his condition is mortally threatening to us all. His species’ time is numbered and to those of his kind that genuinely see their mistake, they should be helped. Others, who think they’ve got it all figured out already, should be ignored and kept at arm's length. The unconscious man will not die without a fight, and his unconsciousness will make the fight terrifyingly devastating, if not handled with the utmost awareness. Maintaining the status quo, ‘returning things to normal’, being safe in numbers, being right by the shared opinions of the many, amassing means of survival for oneself... These are all the weapons of the unconscious man and he will not hesitate to use them to preserve himself. He will do anything to keep himself in the dark, to stay unconscious, to maintain the illusion that he already knows everything he needs to. The biggest threat to the ego is what does not directly promote its survival. A gun to the head, a new discovery that threatens the old paradigm, realizing the truth of oneself. When self-agenda goes against the truth, the ego’s choice is a no-brainer. Literally. The ego doesn’t even consider it could ever be wrong. It cannot be wrong. It knows what’s best for you and it can prove it by the fact that it has kept you alive up until now. Can you argue with that proof? Of course not. The ego’s got you by the balls, or by the ovaries. But while it might have kept you alive so far, how’s that life worked out for you? Are you so fulfilled with it that you could die tomorrow and be okay with that? If not, then you’re unconscious, much like the vast majority of the human species. Vast, meaning 99,99%. Do you think cavemen were ignorant because they didn’t know why the winds blew? Do you think people from medieval ages were ignorant because they believed in witchcraft, burning people by the thousands? Do you think tribesmen in Africa are ignorant because they didn’t go to school? No, our level of ignorance is the same as theirs. We never left the Dark Ages. We’re as ignorant as we ever were - even worse so because we’ve masked our ignorance with reason and logic. Technological advancement does not equate to ‘banishment of ignorance’. Acquiring knowledge does not equate to true knowing. Improving the outer circumstances of your life does not improve your inner world. Today, we’re living in the Age of Delusion , Rationality is our God and Business is our moral code of conduct. Unconsciousness is the most valued state of being, Symbols are more valuable than the things they represent. The Ego has been set loose upon the world, killing its own Mother Earth for profit, and is now turning its eyes toward the stars, to spread itself like a cancer until all of the universe is under its dominance. Sounds like some dystopian science fiction premise, right? But then again, is dystopian science fiction mere entertainment, or is it a warning, a prophet of doom in disguise? What’s more trustworthy, the ‘facts’ provided by the institutions who don’t even realize they're unconscious, or ‘fiction’ dreamt up by individuals who feel like their voices need to be heard, who feel they’ve tapped into something that should be shared? Could it be that fact and fiction are different sides of the same coin? Witchcraft was a fact in medieval times. Today, it’s fiction. The Earth revolving around the sun used to be a fiction in the past. Today, it’s a fact. It’s all perspective, all arbitrary. ‘Facts’ are worth no more than a passing thought in a child’s mind as he plays in his sandbox. Without knowing the mind that came up with the fact, without understanding the limits of the logic that supports a premise, a fact has no more inherent ‘truth’ in it than fiction does. Realize that with logic you can win an argument even if your argument is factually wrong . All logic is based on some premise, on some ‘thing’ that you arbitrarily ascribe truth to and if that premise is flawed, then no amount of logic or reasoning can ever take you to the right answer. If you firmly believe in the existence of a God, then no amount of scientific evidence can shake your logic, for you have decided that your premise is flawless. And if you firmly believe in science, then no amount of miracles will deter your logic, for your premise does not allow miracles to even exist. The tragedy of the unconscious man is that he does not know, what he does not know. You don’t know what you don’t know. How could you? If you knew what you don’t know, then you’d know everything. But you know nothing, Jon Snow. You think you know yourself because you can spell your name? The name is a symbol, a word your parents used so they could call you to the table for dinner. You think you know yourself because you can tell me your likes and dislikes, your dreams and passions, your fears and insecurities? Most people don’t even know those, but even those who do, how do they know their likes and dislikes are their own? How do you know your values are truly yours and have not been given to you by your parents, society, culture, religion...? How do you know that what you know is true? Do you verify it on Wikipedia? Do you ask a scientist with a Ph.D.? Do you ask your parents, your God, your friends? Do you contemplate the answers yourself? Questions. It is by questioning that the unconscious man begins his climb out of the darkness. But you won’t ask questions if you believe you already have the answers. And you will not dig deep enough to find the truth of your question if you settle for the first answer that comes your way. That’s why it’s so hard for the unconscious man to even begin to change. He has no solid ground upon which to stand, he isn’t sure who to trust, what’s real and what’s not. He has to create a clearing in his mind where he can hopefully catch a glimpse of the real world. A crack in the Matrix. A glitch in his augmented reality. A moment of peace in the ever noisy mind-chatter of his ADD brain. You say, ‘Wait a minute. Something’s not right here. What am I doing with my life?’ And just like that, with the rise of the first question, a whole new cosmos of possibility opens up. The unconscious man glimpses a tiny circle of light above his head - the exit from his cave of ignorance, the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, you have to take every single word you read with a grain of salt. I’m also a member of the Homo Sapiens Nescium race, I’m also unconscious. My ego has me by the balls and if I were to die tomorrow I’d be far from okay with it today. But I’ve been lucky enough to have seen a glimpse of the exit. A way out has been presented to me and it would take no more than a blink of an eye and I’d never seen it. How many glimpses have you been presented with in your life, but you blinked with your mind at the worst time? How many chances were you given to climb out of the hole, how many opportunities to question? Maybe you’ve even started the climb. Maybe you’re not far from the exit. If you do ever get out and step into the light, if you become the conscious man (or woman), then it's your duty to reach a helping hand to those who’re still climbing. But remember, an organism that is threatened with extinction will do anything to keep itself alive and the unconscious man is a master at just that, staying alive. Keep your feet firm on the ground and do not let yourself be pulled back under. Honor the chance at life that you’ve been given, by actually living it. Because, for all the immortality of your soul, this life that you have right now will never be lived again, so why squander such a gift? Be a hero. Be conscious. Your life and the world will thank you for it.