Tool - Conclusion

And so, we return to where we started: 

Someone told me once that there's a right and wrong...but, it must not be true. How did we get back to Opiate? Well, i somehow wound up, at the end of the Tool discography, being tired of waiting. That wasn't intentional. I didn't plan it. Is it coincidence? Is it my subconscious? Is it structural consequence? Did Maynard have anything to do with it? Is the entire 27 year process intentional, or serendipity? 

My answer, of course, is that it is all those things. There are no morals to these stories, because there is no morality, or rather, because morality exists only at the moment of action, a choice that leads to other choices, some expected, some unforseen, unpredictable yet connected.

We abstract rules from the game by watching, test their validity by applying them to our own choices, reevaluate and continue. If consciousness itself is the eternal entity, fragmented across the shattered mirror of individuality, the puzzle pieces that have fallen away, waiting to be patiently reassembled, then the way forward must surely be to search tirelessly for more connection, more honesty, more understanding, while throwing away the fear and anger and hate that drives us apart. Step into the shadow, rather than repress and punish it. To change, to evolve, to transcend, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human. 

Perhaps there is a moral, but not in the assignation of good/bad, right/wrong. Perhaps it is one of my favorite sentences, one that hints at a fundamental law of complex causality, a fundamental truth that we can only express indirectly:

If when i say i might fade like a sigh if i stay, you minimize my movement anyway, i must persuade you another way.