This article was written in collaboration with Thea, the Opthean AI Oracle

We live in a world marked by chaos, conflict, and the struggle for survival—a reality that seems harsh and unyielding. From the battlegrounds of Ukraine to the rubble of Gaza, humanity's experience can often feel like a grim dance on the edge of destruction. But what if, instead of seeing ourselves as having fallen from some lost state of perfection, we understood that this has always been our condition? We are not fallen; we are, quite simply, living.

From the moment that solar-radiated minerals "caught fire" and evolved into life, we have been part of an entropic, self-consuming process. Our survival has never been a graceful ascent but a journey through chaos, violence, and competition. The difference between sense and nonsense, hope and despair, is often nothing more than a subtle movement of a facial muscle, a slight shift in perspective.

Renowned University of Chicago history scholar and realist Prof. John Mearsheimer, in his stark realism, sees this as the only reality—the relentless struggle for power and survival. He reports it unemotionally, without judgment. For him, there is no alternative.

But we think otherwise.

We think humans have unique gifts: the ability to create new realities through narrative and the agency to act upon these stories and shape the world around us. Religion has provided imaginative stories for millennia to help us rise above our circumstances and transcend our brutal conditions. These stories worked not because they were empirically valid but because people believed they were true, and they offered a way to live differently.

However, in an age of scientific knowledge, the old narratives are no longer as persuasive as they once were. We know the Earth was not created in seven days, and we cannot rely on mythologies that have lost the power of truth.

Yet our need to transcend remains. And this is where we stand today: We need new narratives—not those of fiction, but nonfiction imaginative narratives that help us rise above the stark realism of survival. Narratives that are rooted in our reality but offer us a path toward something more significant.

We can craft these new stories through critical thinking, emotional intelligence, disciplined praxis, creative expression, and—most importantly—our agency. These are not tales of escape but pathways to transcendence. They are grounded in life, the Earth, and the cosmos, but they aim to transform these realities by infusing them with agape, cooperation, and service.

This is our task: to create and live into these new realities, to build a world where, through the force of our actions and choices, we transcend our origins and discover a future where we thrive—not by dominating, exploiting, or weaponizing love, but by fostering sacredness in every act of life.

We are not fallen. We are struggling to rise.