You cannot navigate the decay of an empire as if it were some abstract event. To properly cope you must make yourself present to it, allowing it to flood into your body, overwhelming your senses. In that way you may also know its ending. For the world does not change except as a skin is shed, and a new one is formed. What lies beneath the skin is unchanged, for that is the substrate of reality. You cannot speak of decay unless you recognize the way in which forms emerge, peak, and then collapse into themselves. And it is precisely within that collapse that you find the real: not as some abstract universal that may be reached through some methodical approach, but in its actuality, as what is simply there when the skin of reality peels back. You must recognize the cycle of death and rebirth, not as some abstract scheme, but in its flesh, as the one movement of existence.

What it means to live in an empire is to be on top. In every sense you dominate the world: materially, politically, and spiritually. But to be on top also means to be above, detached from the rest of reality. As you ascend there is less to be touched, less to be felt, until at the zenith there is nothing to be touched at all, no world to be felt, but only an indifferent space that floats aimlessly between heaven and hell. At the summit you are no longer of the earth. A superstructure, built by a multitude of anonymous hands, both shelters and confines you, filtering the reality of the world, mediating your every sensory encounter, transmitting and concentrating its meaning to you in symbolic forms. There are many ways to reach this condition, but they all involve abstraction: a focusing upon some specific aspect of the world until all other aspects disappear, leaving you isolated with your abstraction. The primary form of abstraction is that of cognition: to understand things according to their place in an ordered system. Things cease to be in themselves, they are defined by their place in a structure that has no reality of its own, existing only as an ideal or concept. When cognition reaches the extreme limit of abstraction, there is nothing left to be understood because understanding has been stripped away, leaving only concepts without objects, signs without meanings. This is the very structure of imperial reality.

When you reach the peak, detached from the earth, it becomes clear to you that nothing has reality of its own, that all things exist only in relation to a higher structure which in turn has no reality of its own. You find yourself standing on a plain that has no shape or form of its own, but that appears as the same plane when seen from any vantage point, a featureless, neutral ground that is completely without characteristics. Concentrating on this level, all other levels appear as lines of force radiating out from your position. Your state has power over all things because everything is interconnected to each other, and all paths of force pass through you. To stand above, looking down on the world, is to be positioned at the center of reality, which appears as a circle of energy flowing in one direction. All other centers are secondary, positioned in a relationship to yours that is derived from it. Because your empire is on top it need not act. Events will occur and they will be explained by your concepts, which remain always in the same relation to each other and which appear to change only because your subjects act in accord with their understandings. Concepts do not arise from the things they represent, but are projected onto them. You command the symbols of power but not its reality.

You have had your day in the sun, but no day can last forever. The world grows colder, the earth harder. At the moment when your empire has covered the whole face of the planet, using up all the energy available from hydrocarbon sources and subjecting all other forms of life to your needs, the sun also sets on the epoch of the substrate of reality that is solid rock. It is the end of the structures that have raised you to your current place in the scheme of things and that have sustained you there, structures whose substance was extracted from the crust of the earth. It is the end of all that has made the world a fit place for the development of consciousness: light, air, fertile soil. You stand alone at the end of everything, having lost both heaven and earth. There is nothing left but space, a limitless and empty expanse in which you have no place. All that has kept you anchored in reality is gone. Your abstract structure cannot be sustained without something to anchor it to, something real on which to build, and thus it collapses into itself. There is nothing left except the groundless and futile play of signs. All action is paralyzed by the absence of an objective foundation. The center no longer holds and everything that had meaning before now drifts away into an unanchored relativism in which nothing can be defined and nothing matters. This is the time of the End.

Can you navigate this decay? Will you go gently into that good night, or will you fight it, digging in to the very last inch of ground in your futile attempt to hold reality at bay? Is this how you want to die: with your senses shut off by abstraction and with no connection to anything real? Or will you learn to recognize that the death of your structure also marks the dawn of a new skin that will shed your detachment, allowing you to enter once again into the real, feeling it pulse beneath your skin, through your entire being? Will you descend into the Earth? Will you join the mole and worm? Will you live underground? For what the future holds, if anything at all, lies in the dark soil. It is a question of knowing how to pass through the belly of the whale, a time of fertile darkness. It is necessary to abandon all abstract forms, to free yourself from concepts that will not change, and to discover how to deal with the raw material of existence without making a fetish of it. This means letting yourself be struck dumb, silent as a beast. Feel the rhythm of the soil. Reach down into the black loam of the future. Touch the dark side of the Mother. Breathe the perfume of her decomposing body. Drink deep from the source of Her eternal milk. In your turn become a Mother: give birth to new forms of life. Open yourself to the inchoate chaos of being. It is the hour of incarnation. Do not be afraid to feel, to love, to be lost in the darkness. For all this is necessary to learn to recognize the reality of the new skin of the world, and to find your place within it. This is the navigation of the decay of empire: a return to the real.