the rise of distance

October 26, 2025

“We became gods of description—
yet forgot how to feel what we define.”
— EthicaFlux

the myth of knowing

Before the age of science,
truth was shared through story.
Tribes, temples, kingdoms—
each lived within a narrative large enough
to hold their wonder.

Yuval Noah Harari once wrote
that humans became powerful
not because we were stronger or faster,
but because we could believe in shared fictions.
We could act together under ideas—
nations, gods, money, love.

But in time, the fictions we made
became the worlds we served.
Belief turned to system.
Myth turned to mechanism.

The modern mind was born
not by creation, but by separation.
And the first cut was light.

the invention of certainty

The seventeenth century—
when Europe first measured the heavens
and began to doubt the soul.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) lifted a telescope toward the night
and declared that nature was written in the language of mathematics.
René Descartes (1596–1650) turned his gaze inward
and separated mind from matter.

With them, the modern age began—
an age of radiant light,
of knowing by standing apart.

To know became to isolate.
The observer stepped outside the current,
and the current was named the world.

What had once been participation
became observation.
The sacred pulse turned into data.
The divine into a mechanism.

It was not malice—only a loss of rhythm.
Reason became light without echo,
motion without music.

the poet of equations

Then came Isaac Newton (1643–1727)—
the last listener standing at the shore of silence.

He did not wish to dominate the current;
he longed to hear it.
Gravity, to him, was conversation—
a subtle sympathy between bodies across space.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world,
but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

He stood at the edge of that ocean—
half scientist, half mystic.
One ear to nature, the other to God.

But the world after him heard only the formula.
It took his awe and called it control.
It mistook humility for mastery.

The listener became the engineer.
The seashore became a laboratory.
The ocean was charted—
but the sound of its waves was lost.

From Newton onward,
the river of knowledge split in two:
one branch measuring the flow,
the other remembering its music.

the age of mirrors

Then came the mirrors.
The human eye learned to measure
what the heart once heard.

Numbers replaced wonder.
Light conquered sound.
Likes replaced touch.

Certainty spread faster than silence.
We modeled everything—
except the feeling of being alive.

The triumph of clarity became
the poverty of meaning.

We live surrounded by evidence,
but starved of presence.

the listener returns

And yet, not all fell silent.
In the same century, another mind
listened where others measured.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)—
a lens grinder, a heretic, a quiet revolution.

He lived amid the same age of reason,
yet reason for him was never cold—
it was radiant.

He used geometry not to divide,
but to listen without distortion.
His logic was a form of love:
the mind learning to move with the order of nature.

“Deus sive Natura,” he wrote—
God, or Nature.
For they were never two.

Through this, he dissolved the boundaries
that Descartes had drawn.
Mind and body were not separate;
they were different expressions of the same current.

“The human mind is the idea of the human body.”

To think, then,
is to feel the world thinking through us.
Reason is not the opposite of emotion—
it is emotion clarified,
the flow of understanding made lucid.

His Ethics was not an abstraction but a practice—
a manual for how to live in tune with necessity,
to transform passive suffering into active understanding.
In that sense,
his geometry was a kind of music.

He called its highest state the intellectual love of God—
a knowledge that does not grasp but participates,
a clarity so complete
it becomes compassion.

the unfinished dawn

And yet the world was not ready.
The same century that birthed him also buried him.

The modern age—rising on light and certainty—
could not yet hear what he heard.
Spinoza’s philosophy was not the beginning of modernity,
but its echo—
a voice from the future whispered too early.

For three centuries,
we have lived within that light—
an era of measurement, mastery, and mirrors.
We have seen everything,
except the living current beneath our seeing.

But now the mirrors are cracking.
The light has begun to tire.
Data, reason, and evidence—our proudest tools—
bend beneath what they cannot measure:
feeling, tenderness, awe.

And so we return—
not backward, but inward—
to listen again.

Spinoza was not before his time.
We are only now catching up.

His lens has been waiting for our eyes to soften,
his geometry for our hearts to move.
What he glimpsed in exile
may yet become our reunion.

That is where we turn next—
to listen as he once did,
to feel the flow thinking through us again.

“And the current did not end—
it turned inward,
to listen to itself once more,
and began to flow again.”
— Ethica Flux

transition

Thus ends the age of mirrors.
What begins next
is not a brighter light,
but a deeper listening.

The next chapter will be called:
on listening.