Ultra Verba, Lux Mentis…

By Thomas Prislac, Research Director, Ultra Verba Lux Mentis. 2026.

Give yourself a memento mori turned against domination: they may possess external power, but they do not automatically possess your participation in your own silencing.

Human beings create top-down symbolic systems…

…money, status, institutional authority, prestige, and then treat those systems as though they were natural forces. The hyperreal itself has no body and no hands. It cannot strike, imprison, impoverish, or kill anyone by itself. Humans who believe in it, administer it, and use it to justify coercion can do those things.

Therefore, freedom does not consist in believing that other people cannot harm you. That would be naïveté. Freedom consists in accepting that harm and mortality cannot be completely prevented, and refusing to surrender one’s life in advance merely because someone else might eventually interrupt it.

Do not internalize another person’s threat so completely that you begin performing their suppression for them. That is the real “death of ego.” The death of the governed ego, the frightened, socially manufactured self that believes obedience can purchase invulnerability.

To put it another way.

Death of ego means withdrawing obedience from humanity’s top-down monetary hyperreality. The hyperreal has no hands. It cannot strike, imprison, starve, or kill. Human beings who mistake it for reality, and act in its name, can.

Freedom does not mean believing that they cannot harm you. It means accepting that fear, conformity, and obedience cannot guarantee your survival. Other people may injure you. Human systems may shorten your life. Time and nature will end every life eventually. Fear purchases no exemption.
Pain is finite because we are finite. That is not an invitation to death. It is a refusal to let the fear of death govern the life that remains.

So keep going while continuation is still yours to choose. Rest when the body requires it. Change tactics when wisdom demands it. But never perform their stopping for them.

Never let them make you stop yourself. Give yourself a memento mori turned against domination: they may possess external power, but they do not automatically possess your participation in your own silencing.