An Egyptian slave stares up at the limestone monstrosity him and his people are assembling block by block, well aware that it will be his grave; his blood will stain the stones and the sand below will feed upon his carrion cadaver. Beyond the dark miasma of his frail body and mind, he wonders "What succor could make up for this endless suffering?"

His known world, his civilisation, is its own pyramid. A monstrous meat grinder that endlessly devours and torments its people, and he lives as its lowest foundation, decaying since birth—rotted teeth and brittle bones—and the Seventh wonder of the world he is building is his civilisation's ritual altar, an attempt to touch the very Heavens that is erected upon generations of his people's corpses. Is he not more of kin to factory farmed cattle, than he is to his fellow man? The Egyptians perfected human sacrifice, the Mayan's were a pale imitation.

In its attempt to upend the laws of nature, civilisation only ever reinforces them. Is there any difference between a society where rite of birth condemns most men to rot until death in their 30s, and nature where rite of birth condemns most children to die at 3? Death is an omnipresent God. Life, its shadow.

Spenglerites call Western Civilisation Faustian, but could any civilisation be anything but? Over and over they rise and fall, bowing to the same circle of life and death that we do as individuals, fed upon and devoured and integrated by what comes next. Following the same careful genetic memetic evolution you and I do. Icarus flew towards Heaven, not believing in the inevitable drop. Civilisation reaches towards Heaven, ignorant towards the mountain of corpses that make up its stairwell, deifying nature in its attempt to defy it.

History is for the most part, a story of food, for food is life deceased, the fruit of the cycle. When upper class pastoralists journeyed south of the steppes they were often a full foot or more taller than the people they encountered. They were smarter, stronger, and more wild, not unlike the nobility that constructed the leviathan which churns through so many slaves and peasants. Reading of their empires rising and falling in tandem with agricultural ones, trading and raiding and enslaving and retreating on and on, one sees the same eternal cyclical tension that defines all life on Earth. This discourse—between husbandry and farming, between master and slave, between life and death, between predator and prey—is the flux that forms our universe. This is the dance of Yin and Yang, the wheel ever turning, the fundamental rhythm of nature, which connects all life on Earth.

The foundational literature of "Western," culture, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are poems born from a blind man in the cradle between two civilisations. Living in a post apocalyptic world, an age darkened by the drought that massacred the Greeks, Homer sings a song of a great people long past, just as he witnesses another great people loom and grow in front of his eyes. They're barbarian poems, frontier poems, written in the interstice between things, bridging Man and God, civilisation and nature, Heaven and Hell. Within them one senses the wholeness of the world, and life's intimacy with death. Virgil and Plato could never, for Rome was preoccupied staring to the skies above. Homer on the other hand, was well acquainted with the abyss of Hades.

Here in the 21st century, we stand the tallest we ever have, upon the greatest mountain of corpses and death that has ever existed. Tens of thousands of years of history bow their head for us, and an unimaginable amount of death is manipulated and harvested to prop up our drive towards Heaven. On the grand scale, the world only ever seeks equilibrium, karma eternally pulling all things to their centre. We resist, seeking desperately for a way to make the line go up, forever, wishing and hoping, but it never comes. "You can learn a lot about politics by watching the decomposition of a dead body." This is Samsara, the stage on which we are born to dance and then die, that is our doom.

Standing within this chaos, the peasant, pauper, prostitute, and priest who all know pain too well look towards the sky and beg the question: "To what do I owe this torment? For what do I shed blood?"

And only a single voice can pierce through the miasmic veil of suffering. Mother Nature, who rules all things, gives her grace and answers simply. Repose is found in the interconnectedness of all things.

Only armed with this, can the poor Egyptian slave turn towards the world and live. The veil between life and death is paper thin, and earth and the blood shed upon it are one and the same. All things, living and dead, are redeemed by the simple fact that they begin, end, and begin again. This is Dharma, the placeness and flux of all things, and your awareness of your own.

So face the world, scrape up against it, define onesself through will tested against it, and in doing so become one with it, know the deepest intimacy with it, know love, know freedom, and know death. Only then you will never suffer again. There is no great answer, there is only isness.