57. Cuzco, Peru

57.

Cuzco, Peru: Great luxury! I get a room with a hot shower! What wonderful pleasure: my first hot bath since I left Mexico. I lather up my hair and the beard I have allowed to grow and just soak up that fine, wet heat!

Civilization is a hot bath!

Cuzco is such a high city that when I walk I seem to float, but I tire easily.

Today is the Christian holy day, “Good Friday” and the worshipers are out in fervent mobs.

I enter one church where the people have lined up to kiss the painted bloody toe of a realistic Jesus corpse statue. Mothers lift tots into kissing range for the gruesome rite. A priest in the pulpit is exhorting his serious congregation—my Spanish is not good enough to follow his argument, but the cadence is familiar. A priest learns the traditional formula and repeats the words verbatim to his mesmerized flock— fellow dreamers in the Ancient Illusion—the Grand Conspiracy; which can make the unreal, real, or the lie, truth.

But for almost all of us, redundant falsehood, repeated from childhood, IS truth.

The “priesthood”, whether religious or political--which maintains the patent on the formulaic words from generation to generation--thus holds the veritable keys to “truth”. We poor fools never know the difference between this mumbo-jumbo and the real truth, which benefits no bureaucracy.

Real truth, that is, “reality”, is useless as propaganda; meanwhile, we are born into falsehood, live in deceit and die in deception.

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