There used to be a great sacrifice (yagna, in Sanskrit) called the Ashvamedha sacrifice. One couldn’t just simply kill a horse, in the way the Hebrew scriptures demanded constant sacrifice of bulls, goats, and lambs. One had to achieve permission and buy-in from neighboring tribes; multiple kings had to agree that the time had come to engage in such a ritual. Such is described in the Mahabharata, and other Hindu scriptures which survive in some fashion.

The killing of a horse, and its ritual consumption, was literally verboten by our ancestors, except in crucial situations. You are obviously trite in your conceptions (simplistic and mundane), but the real love and dependence upon such a beast was primordial important to our human ancestors.

We owe so much to horses, as a species. For a nihilist, it means nothing, which is fine. One can become a victim of our failures, to be sure, for which an individual should not be excommunicated, but simply reimplemented.

May the fires which underlie your symbolic detachment produce a fruitful rebellion; one in which the faults of human development are exposed, remedied, and transformed into acts of regeneration and exposure—thanks to the reflective power of disintegrated members of our collective humanity, who are no less human for their dispariagement.

For those who make elegant arguments against freewill, there is usually a neurological basis to their position.

Scientists can measure a delay between brain activity and bodily response—not simply that we know what we’re going to say before we say it, but that the biological centers of the brain that produce the thought are not usually associated with conscious cognitive processes (which, when damaged, entirely destroy any outward sign of selfhood). Thus the cognitive centers aren’t generating thought, but interpreting and coordinating its expression. Further the part of the brain that seems to receive or generate the initial thought begins its process long before what one is responding to has finished (you’ll have known your response before I end my comment). In Therefore non-cognitive centers seem to recieve then pass along to the sense-making, self-oriented centers something which is not a fully conscious or considered reaction, and that it only feels like an individual is generating a response because the act if interpretation of thought is what it feels like to have a self—not thinking or cognizing itself. In their view, freewill is an illusion which occurs because of a few hundredths of a second delay called interpretation, or rationalization. But what is interpreted or rationalized wasn’t the result of freewill.

Memory is also important to build this coherence, but memory is flawed, and perception itself is also flawed. Thus one of the aspects of the conscious observer is to arrange memory narratively, while interpreting new data within its own framework, which is selective, and instantly rejective of anything outside of its frame of reference. This means memory isn’t based on reality (what is projected) anymore than projection is independently a basis of reality (as it depends on being observed).

Thus the many layers of ‘delay’, to be general, obscur any fundamental reality, which is at best a memory which functions as a tentative ‘present’, but which is never fully observed, since the self is constantly rationalizing it.

Who is observing the observer…?

If we are allowed to discuss Vedanta, which is most popularly described with the Advaita conclusion, then we are left with a possibility that nothing truly ‘exists’, except as a projection—even the projection of the body through which two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two halves of the tongue, and two hands do all the heavy lifting…as a projection of the ‘sense organs’, which have as their product the ‘objects of the senses’ (not the reverse). The senses, as subtle instruments of perception, project their results, rather than recieve them and interpret them.

What we have as forms, or knowledge, lies beyond the projection, and can become enmeshed, as a rope being mistaken as a snake, causing one to recoil at its sight.

But if one can have an incorrect inference, then how does this ‘projection’ occur? Did we accidentally projection a rope when we meant to projection a snake? Obviously not. Thus it is the very possibility of false perception that exposes the possibility of an underlying reality, though it is not ‘in the world’, it is before the world is perceived as a reflection.

The world is a projection of what we reflect. Our knowledge is not important, but our act of projecting is necessary. What is ‘out there’ actually is somewhere else. The organs of the senses are producing the projection based on a reflection of what is actually occurring somewhere else, which is why material occurrences require ‘observation’, which is projection. Though what the mind-parts are actually doing is receiving and reflecting that onto a canvas of material particles, which require our participation, but which don’t on their own constitute Reality. Reality is somewhere else.

Just as with Plato’s cave, we watch images on a wall which are shadows of their true being. Why don’t we perceive directly what we are reflecting and projecting? This is called ignorance, or false identification. We identify with the projection, because we believe we are the sense-mind, endowed with ego (sense of separate existence), whereas the whole show is operating as a single entity which is all entities and happenings all at once, without division.

When one lets-go of their individual identity, it becomes easier to understand. You have a true identity as a form beyond the material projection, but you identify with the projection, which is only one small aspect of the entire flow. Wave vs. Ocean argument. The projection is just inside the mind. One remains trapped inside their mind.