>>4371525I have long since realized you cannot fully connect to other people. Evangelion really explained that one well to me. That is the wall between all men that is dissolved only in Instrumentality, and in death, whose embrace we all share as birthright, regardless of how rich or poor we are born, how able or how crippled. Focus on the self, then, does not seem wrong at all. For Rei, who knows only the collective, it is not understandable fully, while for us, who know the folly of trying to understand and accept other people totally, without reservation, it is essential to survival. I love others, and have been loved; I fight for others, and have been fought for; I have known others well, though to say I have been known to them truly is incorrect, but this last point brings us back to the first and core aspect of it: we are separate here. We are all alone.
This is another point that drives desire for Unification, as it is the end of this loneliness. True, the world goes on without it, but it is a world that is cold, cruel, miserable, ephemeral, and ultimately unsatisfying and undesirable, the bad outweighing the good, the selfish the selfless. Hence I think that the hubris of mankind can only be brought to an end by force, either by self-destruction or overwhelming Instrumentality that overwhelms our self-centred desires to stay as we are, to not change, to let the world be unideal.
But until that time comes, we shall have to go on, in what often feels like a vain hope.
