/similar_quotes/1216

Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: kindle import (0)

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.


True (though still hidden) historical movement begins with the slow and imperceptible development of the “real nature of man”—the “nature that is born with human history, out of the generative action of human society.” But even when such a society has developed a technology and a language and is already a product of its own history, it is conscious only of a perpetual present. Knowledge is carried on only by the living, never going beyond the memory of the society’s oldest members. Neither death nor procreation is understood as a law of time. Time remains motionless, like an enclosed space. When a more complex society finally becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it—it views time not as something that passes, but as something that returns. This static type of society organizes time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with its own direct experience of nature.


The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously—the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its constant harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to any consideration of methods. Its critique of political struggle has thus remained abstract, while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single blow on this terrain, on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have saddled themselves with fulfilling an ideal. Anarchism remains a merely ideological negation of the state and of class society—the very social conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the ideology of pure freedom, an ideology that puts everything on the same level and loses any conception of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing lesson, because this lesson has from the beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of the movement. This is reflected in Bakunin’s 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura Federation: “During the past nine years the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a new one. It’s no longer the time for ideas, it’s time for actions.” This perspective undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thought’s recognition that ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition to practice have already been discovered and will never change.


Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

[Margo] Jefferson believes that the 'problem' of memoir is 'figuring out how to examine and dramatize ourselves without forgetting to pay the same attention to the larger historical and spiritual forces that have made us.' This, she argues, The Kiss does not do. Harrison's book, she concludes, is of a piece with the publicity surrounding it: 'In the end, you have to treat 'The Kiss' as if it were performance art, with the book, the reviews, the interviews, the editorials and the readers' responses all spread across some vast media gallery.


From time to time, in a spirit of formal innovation, critics have south to free autobiography from its perennial allegiance to biography's concern with narrative chronology, as though narrative's primacy in self-accounting were merely a matter of literary convention. As I have shown in this chapter, however, narrative's role in self-representation extends well beyond the literary; it is not merely one form among many in which to express identity, but rather an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience, that of the extended self, the self in time. If my reading of narrative's place in life writing is correct, to move beyond narrative would involve not merely a shift in literary form but a more fundamental change in the culturally sanctioned narrative practices that function as the medium in which the extended self and autobiographical memory emerge.


What, it is fair to ask at this point, does 'memory talk' look like? Here is an example of an exchange between a twenty-four-month-old boy and his mother, which Nelson quotes to illustrate the dominant role of the parent in the memory work involved:\r\n\r\n>C: Mommy, the Chrysler building\r\nM: The Chrysler building?\r\nC: The Chrysler building?\r\nM: Yeah, who works in the Chrysler building?\r\nC: Daddy\r\nM: Do you ever go there?\r\nC: Yes, I see the Chrysler building, picture of the Chrysler building\r\nM: I don't know if we have a picture of the Chrysler building. Do we?\r\nC: We went to..my Daddy went to work\r\nM: Remember when we went to visit Daddy? Went in the elevator, way way up in the building so we could look down from the big window?\r\nC: big window\r\nM mmhm... (Language 166)\r\n\r\nFrom such fragmentary beginnings as these, where the parent is doing most of the work, the balance of power will gradually shift until the child, having acquired the habit of reviewing autobiographical memories and mastered the narrative skills to organize them, can perform a self-narration of her own, such as this one by Emily in monologue at thirty-three months:\r\n\r\n>We bought a baby.\r\n[False starts: cause, the, well because, when she, well]\r\nwe thought it was for Christmas,\r\n*but when* we went to the store we didn't have our jacket on,\r\n*but* I saw some dolly,\r\n*and* I yelled at my mother and said\r\nI want one of those dolly.\r\n*So after* we were finished with the store,\r\nwe went over to the dolly and she bought me one,\r\n*So* I have one. (Language 204)\r\n\r\nStudy of this material, Nelson concludes, reveals children in the process of learning 'to talk about - and to remember - their experience in specific ways': 'They learn, that is, to 'narrativize' their experience' (Language 170). \r\n\r\nIn this formative phase of 'memory talk,' where parents are teaching the child how to work with autobiographical memories, parental styles of engagement can exert an enormous influence, transmitting both models of self and story.\r\n\r\n*Language*: Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind


...students of memory today hold that past experience is necessarily - both psychologically and neurologically - constructed anew in each memory event or act of recall.


...narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self - the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. I have always been convinced that narrative occupies a central and determining place in the autobiographical enterprise, but I now make a much bolder claim for its function in self-representation. ...I asked whether the self could be said to be narratively structured. I concluded that self and story were 'complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation' (Touching 198). \r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nNarrative and identity are preformed simultaneously...in a single act of self-narration; the self in question is a self defined by and transacted in narrative process. What is arresting about this radical equation between narrative and identity is the notion that narrative here is not merely about the self but rather in some profound way a constituent part of self - of the self, I should be careful to specify, that is expressed in self-narrations, for narrative is not (and cannot be) coextensive with all of selfhood, given the multiple registers of selfhood, about which I will say more in a moment. It follows that the writing of autobiography is properly understood as an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation in which acts of self-narration play a major part.


...autobiographers are primed to recognize the constructed nature of the past, yet they need at the same time to believe that in writing about the past they are performing an act of recovery: narrative teleology models the trajectory of continuous identity, reporting the supreme fiction of memory as fact. 'You' and 'I' and 'she' and 'he' and 'we' - the dialogic play of pronouns in these texts tracks the unfolding of relational identity in many registers, in discourse with others and within ourselves. The lesson these identity narratives are teaching, again and again, is that the self is dynamic, changing and plural.


...Patterns of Childhood is indeed [Christa] Wolf's self-narration, an *intra*relational life which works steadily, as we shall see, to reforge the link between selves past and present. Wolf recognizes continuous identity not only as a fiction of memory but also as an existential fact, necessary for our psychological survival amid the flux of experience. \r\n\r\nLooking back some twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the German novelist seeks to understand her own participation in the pernicious ideology of the Third Reich: as a teenager, she had been an ardent member of a Hitler youth group. But how, the narrator asks, can she connect with an earlier self she has repudiated and repressed? How to begin when at least three distinct stories claim her attention? In this intricately layered narrative, Wolf tracks all three chronologies of her inquiry into the past simultaneously: Nelly's childhood in the 1930's through World War II up to 1946, the narrator's trip to Poland to revisit Nelly's childhood home in July 1971, and the narrator's writing of Nelly's story from November 1972 to 1975. What, Wolf would have us ask, can possibly bind these periods of personal history together? Memory? Narrative? Identity? The use of the first person? 'We would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves,' she observes, 'if it weren't for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that have happened to us. If it weren't for the memory of ourselves' (4). \r\n\r\nDoes memory indeed provide a basis for continuous identity, uniting us to our acts, our experiences, our earlier selves?


[Mary Gordon] was the daughter of a doting father who treated her to lavish displays of affection. So central is the father's love to he child's sense of her own identity that his early death when she is seven creates a profound sense of lack, of want, that Gordon in her forties - successful novelist, happily married, with a child of her own - is still trying to fill. [Paul] Auster could be speaking for Gordon when he observes, wisely, 'You do not stop hungering for your father's love, even after you are grown up' (19)1. Now, in midlife, however, when Gordon sets out to recover her father and his story, she discovers that she wasn't the central figure in his life. Archival research in Washington, in Providence, and in Lorain, Ohio, turns in a painful process of disconfirmation in which everything she thought she knew about her father turns out to have been a lie: reinventing himself (like Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby), David Gordon had edited his siblings, his working-class childhood, and an earlier marriage out of his story, passing himself off as a Harvard graduate, who had converted later on to Catholicism. The records disclose an unattractive stranger, a disreputable man-on-the-make, an Eastern European Jew who wrote for pornographic magazines in which he indulged in anti-Semetic jokes. Struggling to reconcile the idealized image of childhood memory with the stubborn truth of the biographical record, Gordon even attempts briefly to assume her father's identity in order to understand it, conjuring up the immigrant Jewish child's oppressive sense of being burdened with the 'wrong' identity to succeed in the American culture of his day. \r\n \r\nThe turning point in her quest comes when she concludes that 'David Gordon is a man I cannot know.' Refusing to be merely an episode in his story, she appropriates him for her own: 'The man I know is a man I gave birth to. His name is not David. ...It is My Father' (194).2 Her act of possession is as total as she can make it. Not only does she 'give birth to' her father in this narrative, but she literally revises his death as well: in the final section of The Shadow Man Gordon has her father's body exhumed from its place in her mother's family's plot and reburied in Calvary, a cemetery of her own choosing. This is certainly extravagant stuff, as Gordon is certainly aware. ...Gordon and Auster conclude that the story of the proximate other is ultimately unknowable. For Gordon, moreover, it proves to be a story she would prefer not to know, for it can't be integrated into her own identity narrative.\r\n \r\n \r\n1 /publication/70 \r\n2 /publication/71


[Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]'s sensitive - and also startlingly funny - account of the permutations of racial identity, of 'being colored' (xiv), demonstrates how 'we'-experience shapes the trajectory of 'I'-narrative, not only his own but the one he projects for his children: 'In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to 'people of color,' to being, once again, 'colored people.' ...But I have to confess that I like 'colored' best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and the sepia tones of my childhood.


The contemporary debate about the nature of the self portrayed in autobiography was launched forty years ago in a remarkably influential essay written by the French critic Georges Gusdorf, 'Conditions and Limits of Autobiography' (1956). The model Gusdorf posited for the identity that autobiographies presuppose - let us call it the Gusdorf model - was emphatically individualistic, featuring a 'separate and unique selfhood' (Friedman 34). In a similar vein, writing in the 1970's, Phillippe Lejeune (L'Autobiographie) and Karl J. Weintraub traced the rise of modern autobiography to Rousseau and Enlightenment individualism. Then, in 1980, Mary Mason became the first of a long line of feminist critics to repudiate the universalizing claims of this model and question its place in the history of the genre. The model might suitably describe the experience of Augustine and Rousseau, she conceded, but it did not fit the contours of women's lives. Correcting this gender bias, she proposed an alternative model for women: 'identity through relation to the chosen other' (210). \r\n \r\n A few years later, Domna Stanton asked, 'Is the [female] subject different?' and by implication, 'Is women's autobiography different from men's?' Answering yes to these questions, subsequent scholars - and I am thinking especially of Susan Stanford Friedman, Bella Brodzki, and Celeste Schenck - have returned most often to Mason's notion of relational identity as the distinguishing mark of women's lives. Thus, in her essay 'Individuation and Autobiography,' and indictment of 'the conflation of autobiography with male life-writing' and 'the conflation of male experience with critical ideologies' (60), Joy Hooton observes, 'The presentation of the self as related rather than single and isolate is...the most distinctive and consistent difference between male and female life-writing' (70). Following Friedman, Hooton cites research in developmental psychology and sociology, by Carol Gilligan and especially Nancy Chodorow, to support this view that individuation is decisively inflected by gender. The female subject, then, is different, and so is her life story. \r\n \r\n... \r\n \r\nThe understandable pressure to settle on reliable criteria for identifying difference in autobiography, together with the rarity of comparative analysis, has promoted the myth of autonomy that governs our vision of male lives. I hasten to add that men are hardly the victims alone of critical misdescription; like women, men also are constructed by patriarchal ideology. Consolidating the gains of feminist scholarship, and emulating what Sidonie Smith and others have achieved for women's autobiography , we need to liberate men's autobiography from the inadequate model that has guided our reading to date. As Chris McCandless's story demonstrates, the Gusdorf model is potentially a killer. \r\n \r\nWhy, it is fair to ask, didn't critics pick up on the implications for male identity of Mary Mason's early critique of the Gusdorf model? Part of the answer, I believe, is that Mason, Friedman, and other feminist critics helped to keep the old Gusdorf model in place - paradoxically - by attacking it: it didn't apply to women, they argued, but it did to men, leaving men stuck with a model of identity that seems in retrospect rather like a two-dimensional caricature: so-called traditional autobiography became the province of the Marlboro Man.


In a remarkable paper titled 'Five Kinds of Self-knowledge' (1988), [Ulric] Neisser attempts to distinguish 'among several kinds of self-specifying information, each establishing a different aspect of the self.' Although he speaks of 'these aspects' as 'so distinct that they are essentially different selves' with different 'origins and developmental histories' (35), he argues that these selves 'are not generally experienced as separate and distinct' (36). Self or selves? Although Neisser occasionally speaks of the self, he seems ultimately less interested in affirming the self as a single, unified entity than he is in stressing the variety of self-knowledge, the 'self-specifying information' (35) that constitutes our experience. His fivefold modeling counters the tendency toward an oversimplifying reification that is one of the principal drawbacks of self as a term, a reification that obscures the multiple registers of self-experience he seeks to display. \r\nNeisser's selves include the following: \r\n\r\n1. The ecological self: 'the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment; I am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n2. The interpersonal self: 'the self as engaged in immediate unreflective social interaction with another person' (41); 'I am the person who is engaged, here, in this particular human interchange' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n3. The extended self: the self of memory and anticipation, the self existing outside the present moment; 'I am the person who had certain specific experiences, who regularly engages in certain specific and familiar routines' (36). By the age of three, children are aware of themselves 'as existing outside the present moment, and hence of the extended self' (47). \r\n4. The private self: the self of 'conscious experiences that are not available to anyone else' (50); 'I am, in principle, the only person who can feel this unique and particular pain' (36). Although experts differ as to the emergence of this sense of privacy in developmental chronology, many studies show as 'aware of the privacy of mental life before the age of 5' (50). \r\n5. The conceptual self: the extremely diverse forms of self-information - social roles, personal traits, theories of body and mind, of subject and person - that posit the self as a category, either explicitly or implicitly. (Neisser's discrimination of five primary kinds of self-information, of course, is one such conceptual model.)\r\n


How much of what autobiographers say they experience is equivalent to what they really experience, and how much of it is merely what they know how to say? Is there, we should ask, a demonstrable difference between the psychological reality of selfhood and the linguistic articulation of that reality?


Neural Darwinism has the potential to transform not only traditional conceptions of self but of memory as well, as the work or Israel Rosenfield, formerly Edelman's colleague and collaborator, suggests. Rosenfield believes, first of all, that memories are perceptions newly occurring in the present rather than images fixed and stored in the past and somehow mysteriously recalled to present consciousness. As perceptions, memories share the constructed nature of all brain events that TNGS posits: 'Recollection is a kind of perception...and every context will alter the nature of what is recalled' (Invention 89, emphasis added). Rosenfield's second point about memory, a corollary of his view of memory as embedded in present consciousness, is that all memories are self-referential: 'Every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering' (Strange 42). The bond between self and memory can be traced back to Locke, but Rosenfield puts a new spin on this linkage by factoring in the body as a necessary third term in the equation.


...when we look at life history from the perspective of neural Darwinism, it is fair to say that we are all becoming different persons all the time, we are not what we were; self and memory are emergent, in process, constantly evolving, and both are grounded in the body and the body image. Responding to the flux of self-experience, we instinctively gravitate to identity-support-structures: the notion of identity as continuous over time and the use of autobiographical discourse to record its history.


As children begin to represent events that extend over longer time periods, from daily routines, to weekly routines, and so on, they also begin to develop a sense of self that continues to exist through time.


Sharing memories with others is in fact a prime social activity...learned in early childhood, and the result of this learning is the establishment of a store of memories that are shareable and ultimately reviewable by the individual, forming a personal history that has its own value independent of the general memory function of prediction and preparation for future events.


Our brains are continuously projecting the future from the past, and feeding that information to our sensors. We proceed on the basis of that extrapolated future unless the sensors note some discrepancy which has to be dealt with. This seems to correspond exactly to what we know of the operation of the collective unconscious. It is continually drawing on pas experience in order to feed forward its best estimate of the future. At any given moment in time, the collective unconscious is composed of all the experiences of the past, all that is going on presently anywhere among humans, and organic projections into the future based on the first two components. \r\n\r\nHowever, we find ourselves at a unique point in history. Very soon, we will reach the point where there are more people alive in the world than have lived and died in all previous ages put together; as one radio sage put it: 'the dead will become a minority.' I believe this shift is the same as the shift which we have been discussing throughout this book. As long as past experience vastly exceeded current experience, the collective unconscious was inherently conservative: ritual and structure outweighed novelty. Archetypes changed so slowly as to seem eternal. When current experience exceeds past experience, the situation reverses: novelty and change reign supreme. Archetypes should come into existence in dizzying numbers, many staying around too shortly to register. But some stable new archetype, some 'living symbol,' should emerge in an astonishingly quick fashion (by comparison with the glacial scale on which archetypes normally emerge), an archetype powerful enough to overwhelm the archetypes created by the entire past experience of mankind.



And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon because as blood;\r\nAnd the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.\r\nAnd the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.\r\nAnd the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains (6:12-15) \r\n \r\nAs before, the cause of the suffering is too sharp a self-definition, an inability to change. The new only causes pain if one can't - or won't - give up the old, or can't tolerate the paralyzing state of chaos that intervenes between the old and the new. It is just the 'great men' of the existing world - those who are too strongly defined within the terms of that world - who have to descend into darkness before they can come up reborn. They, too, have to give up their old definition. \r\n \r\nWith the opening of this sixth seal, the world as we know it comes to an end. Just as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the seventh seal marks the hiatus between worlds, a time of chaos which we, stuck in the old mold of being, can only experience with 'fear and trembling.



...in life we are each limited by self-definition. To the extent that we say who we are, what and where we are, we have precluded being able to see beyond that definition.


Author: Terence McKenna
Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

Symbols allow us to store information outside of the physical brain. This creates for us a relationship to the past very different from that of our animal companions. Finally, we must add to any analysis of the human picture the notion of self‑directed modification of activity. We are able to modify our behavior patterns based on a symbolic analysis of past events, in other words, through history. Through our ability to store and recover information as images and written records, we have created a human environment as much conditioned by symbols and languages as by biological and environmental factors.


All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do. The word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun. But the matter does not stop there. In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions. So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.


The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se. Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not be good for the dweller within that town. If black ants are seen on the foundations which have been laid, that house will get built; the owner of that house will live to grow old. If a horse enters a man's house, and bites either an ass or a man, the owner of the house will die and his household will be scattered. If a fox runs into the public square, that town will be devastated. If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard and kills it, he will prevail over his adversary. And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way.


In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior. Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them. The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much 62 The Mind of Man more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. The causation may be in either direction. How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly. Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve memories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. Each so-called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality and changing situational factors.6


Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.\n\n The timing of consciousness is also an interesting question. When we are awake, are we conscious all the time? We think so. In fact, we are sure so! I shut my eyes and even if I try not to think, consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware. Always the continuity. Certainly this is the feeling. And whatever we're doing, we feel that our very self, our deepest of deep identity is indeed this continuing flow that only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams. This is our experience. And many thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no one can doubt. Cogito, ergo sum.\n\n It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.


Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

Listen: the chaos you experience under LSD is not an illusion. The orderly world you imagine you experience, under the artificial and poisonous diet which the Illuminati have forced on all civilized nations, is the real illusion. I am not saying what you are hearing. The only good fnord is a dead fnord. Never whistle while you're pissing. An obscure but highly significant contribution to sociology and epistemology occurs in Malignowski's study 'Retroactive Reality,' printed in Wieczny Kwiat Wtadza, the journal of the Polish Orthopsychiatric Psociety, for Autumn 1959. 'All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. Do you follow me?' (In some sense, Joe mutters. . . .) The author, Dr. Malignowski, was assisted by three graduate students named Korzybski-1, Korzybski-2, and Korzybski-3 (Siamese triplets born to a mathematician and, hence, indexed rather than named). Malignowski and his students interviewed 1,700 married couples, questioning husband and wife separately in each case, and asked 100 key questions about their first meeting, first sexual experience, marriage ceremony, honeymoon, economic standing during the first year of marriage, and similar subjects which should have left permanent impressions on the memory. Not one couple in the 1,700 gave exactly the same answers to 100 questions, and the highest single score was made by a couple who gave the same answers to 43 of the questions. 'This study demonstrated graphically what many psychologists have long suspected: the life-history which most of us carry around in our skulls is more our own creation (at least seven percent more) than it is an accurate recording of realities. As Malignowski concludes, 'Reality is retroactive, retrospective and illusory.' 'Under these circumstances, things not personally experienced but recounted by others are even more likely to be distorted, and after a tale passes through five tellers it is virtually one hundred percent pure myth: another example of the Law of Fives.


APPENDIX LAMED: THE TACTICS OF MAGICK \r\n \r\n>The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in The Hunting of the Snark: 'What I tell you three times is true.' \r\n>—NORBERT WEINER, Cybernetics \r\n \r\nThe most important idea in the Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is the simple-looking formula 'Invoke often.' \r\n\r\nThe most successful form of treatment for so-called mental disorders, the Behavior Therapy of Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., could well be summarized in two similar words: 'Reinforce often.' ('Reinforcement,' for all practical purposes, means the same as the layman's term 'reward.' The essence of Behavior Therapy is rewarding desired behavior; the behavior 'as if by magic' begins to occur more and more often as the rewards continue.) Advertising, as everybody knows, is based on the axiom 'Repeat often.' Those who think they are 'materialists' and think that 'materialism' requires them to deny all facts which do not square with their definition of 'matter' are loath to admit the well-documented and extensive list of individuals who have been cured of serious maladies by that very vulgar and absurd form of magick known as Christian Science. Nonetheless, the reader who wants to understand this classic work of immortal literature will have to analyze its deepest meanings, guided by an awareness that there is no essential difference between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be condensed into Abra-Melin's simple 'Invoke often.' Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. \r\n\r\nIf you are told often enough that 'Budweiser is the king of beers,' Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better— perhaps a great deal better— than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy. The opposite and reciprocal of 'Invoke often' is 'Banish often.' The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this 'negative reinforcement,' and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.* Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor's product but discourages interest in all 'false gods'- by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X. * The basic Christian Science mantra, known as 'The Scientific Statement of Being,' no less, is as follows: 'There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is all in all, Spirit is immortal truth: matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material, he is spiritual.' The fact that these statements are, in terms of the scientific criteria, 'meaningless,' 'non-operational,' and 'footless' is actually totally irrelevant. They work. Try them and see. As Aleister Crowley, no friend of Mrs. Eddy's, wrote, 'Enough of Because! May he be damned for a dog!' Hypnotism, debate, and countless other games have the same mechanism: Invoke often and Banish often. \r\n\r\nThe reader who seeks a deeper understanding of this argument can obtain it by putting these principles to the test. If you are afraid that you might, in this Christian environment, fall into taking the Christian Science mantra too seriously, try instead the following simple experiment. For forty days and forty nights, begin each day by invoking and praising the world in itself as an expression of the Egyptian deities. Recite at dawn: I bless Ra, the fierce sun burning bright, I bless Isis-Luna in the night, I bless the air, the Horus-hawk, I bless the earth on which I walk. Repeat at moonrise. Continue for the full forty days and forty nights. We say without any reservations that, at a minimum, you will feel happier and more at home in this part of the galaxy (and will also understand better Uncle John Feather's attitude toward our planet); at maximum, you may find rewards beyond your expectations, and will be converted to using this mantra for the rest of your life. (If the results are exceptionally good, you just might start believing in ancient Egyptian gods.) \r\n\r\nA selection of magick techniques which will offend the reason of no materialist can be found in Laura Archera Huxley's You Are Not the Target (a powerful mantra, the title!), in Gestalt Therapy, by Peris, Heferline, and Goodman, and in Mind Games, by Masters and Houston. All this, of course, is programming your own trip by manipulating appropriate clusters of word, sound, image, and emotional (prajna) energy. The aspect of magick which puzzles, perplexes, and provokes the modern mentality is that in which the operator programs somebody else's trip, acting at a distance. It is incredible and insulting, to this type of person, if one asserts that our Mr. Nkrumah Fubar could program a headache for the President of the United States. He might grant that such manipulating of energy is possible if the President was told about Mr. Fubar's spells, but he will not accept that it works just as well when the subject has no conscious knowledge of the curse. The magical theory that 5 = 6 has no conviction for such a skeptic, and magicians have not yet proposed a better theory. The materialist then asserts that all cases where magic did appear to work under this handicap are illusions, delusions, hallucinations, 'coincidences,'* misapprehensions, 'luck,' accident, or downright hoax. * Look up the etymology of that word some time and see if it means anything. He does not seem to realize that asserting this is equivalent to asserting that reality is, after all, thermoplastic— for he is admitting that many people live in a different reality than his own. Rather than leave him to grapple as best he can with this self-contradiction, we suggest that he consult Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by Ostrander and Schroder—especially Chapter 11, 'From Animals to Cybernetics: The Search for a Theory of Psi.' He might realize that when 'matter' is fully understood, there is nothing a materialist need reject in magick action at a distance, which has been well explored by scientists committed to the rigid Marxist form of dialectical materialism. \r\n\r\nThose who have kept alive the ancient traditions of magick, such as the Ordo Templi Orientalis, will realize that the essential secret is sexual (as Saul tries to explain in the Sixth Trip) and that more light can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, M. D., than in the current Soviet research. But Dr. Reich was jailed as a quack by the U.S. Government, and we would not ask our readers to consider the possibility that the U.S. Government could ever be Wrong about anything. Any psychoanalyst will guess at once the most probable symbolic meanings of the Rose and the Cross; but no psychologist engaged in psi research has applied this key to the deciphering of traditional magic texts. The earliest reference to freemasonry in English occurs in Andersen's 'Muses Threnody,' 1638: \r\n\r\n>For we be brethren of the Rosey Cross \r\n>We have the Mason Word and second sight \r\n\r\nbut no parapsychologist has followed up the obvious clue contained in this conjunction of the vaginal rose, the phallic cross, the word of invocation, and the phenomenon of thought projection. That the taboos against sexuality are still latent in our culture explains part of this blindness; fear of opening the door to the most insidious and subtle forms of paranoia is another part. (If the magick can work at a distance, the repressed thought goes, which of its is safe?) A close and objective study of the anti-LSD hysteria in America will shed further light on the mechanisms of avoidance here discussed. Of course, there are further offenses and affronts to the rationalist in the deeper study of magick. We all know, for instance, that words are only arbitrary conventions with no intrinsic connection to the things they symbolize, yet magick involves the use of words in a manner that seems to imply that some such connection, or even identity, actually exists. The reader might analyze some powerful bits of language not generally considered magical, and he will find something of the key. For instance, the 2 + 3 pattern in 'Hail Eris'/'All hail Discordia' is not unlike the 2 + 3 in 'Holy Mary, Mother of God,' or that in the 'L.S./M.F.T.' which once sold many cartons of cigarettes to our parents; and the 2 + 3 in Crowley's 'Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!' is a relative of these. Thus, when a magician says that you must shout 'Abrahadabra,' and no other word, at the most intensely emotional moment in an invocation, he exaggerates; you may substitute other words; but you will abort the result if you depart too far from the five-beat pattern of 'Abrahadabra.' A glance at the end of Appendix Beth will save the reader from misunderstanding the true tenor of these remarks. \r\n\r\nBut this brings us to the magical theory of reality. Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji (Aleister Crowley again, under another pen-name) writes in Yoga for Yahoos: \r\n\r\n>Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, color, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese . . . What then are these qualities of which we are so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and seen, of subject and object... \r\n\r\nThere is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that sensed reality - the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain— is radically different from so-called objective reality.1 About the latter 'reality' we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory is not totally false. It is never, in any case, proof that the theory is totally true— for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller all work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space. \r\n\r\nIf we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about 'objective reality,' we have even more liberty in deciphering the 'given' or transactional sensed reality. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense —that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation— which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above— he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.2\r\n\r\nThis book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes— that is, part of Operation Mindfuck— has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik's mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite. \r\n\r\nThe Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic girl in every way— except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously— until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.3 One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation. \r\n\r\nOne weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church— and it wasn't her. Hence, this early introduction to la dolce vita.) One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the 'eccentric international businessman' Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening. It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening rapt-ly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying—he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately. \r\n' 'Son, son,' Hagbbard recited, ' 'with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?' Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable. \r\n'And the boy replied,' Hagbard went on, ' 'I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.' ' There was a shocked silence. \r\n'The case is quite typical,' Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. 'Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas.' \r\n'I don't see ...' a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. 'Oh,' he said, 'was the boy an American?' \r\nMiss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass. A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke. \r\n'The moon has a fat jaw tonight,' he said in Italian. 'Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth.' \r\n'Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?' she asked coolly. 'That sounds as if it might be American verse.' \r\nHe laughed— a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. 'Quite so,' he said. 'I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America's major poet of this century. How old are you?' he asked suddenly. \r\n'Almost sixteen,' she said fumbling the words. \r\n'Almost fifteen,' he corrected ungallantly. \r\n'If it's any affair of yours—' \r\n'It might be,' he replied easily. 'I need a girl your age for something I have in mind.' \r\n'I can imagine. Something foul.' He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. \r\n'Child,' he said, 'are you religious?' \r\n'I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned,' she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant. \r\n'At this point in history,' he said simply, 'it's the only thing that isn't old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind— you must be a Virgo.' \r\n'I am,' she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) 'But that is superstition, not religion.' \r\n'I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science.' He smiled. 'I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?' His persistence was maddening. \r\n'I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant,' she replied— immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism. \r\n'What symbol means the most to you?' he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap. \r\n'The cross,' she said quickly. She didn't want him to know the truth. \r\n'No.' He again corrected her ungallantly. 'The Sacred Heart.' \r\nThen she knew he was of Satan's party. \r\n'I must go,' she said. \r\n'Meditate further on the Sacred Heart,' he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist's (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). 'Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism — and the essential of all other religion.' \r\n'I think you are mad,' she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste. But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared—leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents— and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.4 \r\n\r\nThe importance of symbols— images— as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga— we reiterate—are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy. Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.5 \r\n\r\nThe eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume— except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye's meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter ayin, the eye. The reader who realizes that 'The Devil' is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of Yod, the father, with He, the Mother, as in Yod-He-Vau-He, the holy unspeakable name of God. Vau, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final He is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member, Vau, the elusive Holy Ghost. \r\n\r\nThe pentagram comes in two forms but always represents the fullest extension of the human psyche— the male human psyche in particular. The pentagram with one horn exalted is, quite naturally, associated with the right-hand path; and the two-horned pentagram with the left-hand path. (The Knights Templar, very appropriately, inscribed the head of Baphomet, the goat-headed deity who was their equivalent of Pan or the Devil, within the left-handed pentagram in such wise that each 'horn' contained one of Baphomet's horns.) It is to be observed that the traditionally sinister7 left-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point upward, whereas the right-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point downward; this nicely illustrates the Law of Opposites.8 The pentagon in the Sacred Chao is tilted from the perpendicular so that it cannot be said to have any points directly upward or directly downward—or perhaps can be said to have 1 ½ points up and 1 ½ points down9 — thereby illustrating the Reconciliation of Opposites. All that can be said against the method of the left-hand pentagram, without prejudice, is that this form of the sacrament is always destructive of the Holy Spirit, in a certain sense. It should be remembered that the right-hand pentagram method is also destructive in most cases, especially by those practitioners so roundly condemned in Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses— and this group is certainly the majority these days. In view of the ecological crisis, it might even be wise to encourage the left-hand method and discourage the right-hand method at this time, to balance the Sacred Numbers. \r\n\r\nVery few readers of the Golden Bough have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer's veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting the dead (which is at least partially successful in all cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao— or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis's magical workings. In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few10 variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the 'one eye opening' or the 'one hand clapping'; and this sacrifice cannot be partial— it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious. The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to life on earth; the reader should bear this in mind. The sacrifice is not simple. It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim. Anything less than death—that is, complete oblivion—simply will not work.11 (One will find more clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.) \r\n\r\nThe symbolism of the swastika is quite adequately explained in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is chiefly emblematic of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.12 The Roman Catholic symbolism of the Sacred Heart is strikingly overt, especially to readers of Frazer and Payne-Knight. In essence, it is the same notion conveyed by the cartoonist's conventional rendering of Cupid shooting his arrow into a red pulsating heart. This is the basic meaning of the Dying God and the Resurrection. The identification of Christ with the pelican who stabs its own heart with its beak (to feed its young) is an analogous rendering of the same motif. We repeat that it was only because the Saure family so misread these simple symbols that they became cruel and sadistic. In essence, then, the basic symbols, of magic, mythology, and religion—whether Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, 'right-hand' or 'left-hand'—are so simple that only the pernicious habit of looking for alleged 'profundities' and 'mysteries' prevents people from automatically understanding them almost without thinking. The meaning of the hexagram— the female equivalent of the male pentagram— was explicated by Freud himself, but most students, convinced that the answer could not be so elementary and down-to-earth, continue to look into the clouds. \r\n\r\n1 See the anthology Perception, edited by Robert Blake, Ph.D., and especially the chapter by psychologist Carl Rogers, which demonstrates that people's perceptions change while they are in psychotherapy. As William Blake noted, 'The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.' \r\n2 Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it. \r\n3 These two signs of growth often appear at the same time, being DNA-triggered openings of the fourth neural circuit. \r\n4 They were quite good friends, though, and he did fuck her occasionally. \r\n5 This book has stated it as clearly as possible in a number of places, but some readers are still wondering what we are holding back. \r\n6 This being has more in common with the ordinary nocturnal visitor, sometimes called a 'ghost,' than is immediately evident to the uninitiated. Cf. the well-documented association of poltergeist disturbances with adolescents. \r\n7 This association, attributing diabolism to the left-hand path, is oversimplified, prejudiced, and superstitious. In general, it can be said that the left-hand pentagram is suitable for both invocations and evocations, whereas the right-hand pentagram is suitable only for evocations, and mat is the only important difference. (It is assumed that the reader understands the pentagram as an exclusively male symbol.) \r\n8 Cf. the Tarot trumps II and III—the Magus, holding one arm upward and one downward, and the High Priestess, sitting between the pillars of Day and Night. (The Priestess is also associated with the Hebrew letter gimmel, the camel, and part of the meaning of this symbolism is contained in the shapes of the camel's back and the Hebrew letter.) \r\n9 This makes it quite useless for summoning werewolves. The Sacred Chao, however, is intended to teach a philosophical lesson, not to attract individuals with dubious pastimes. \r\n10 Fewer than seventy, according to a classical enumeration. \r\n11 The magician must always identify fully with the victim, and share every agonized contortion to the utmost. Any attitude of standing aside and watching, as in a theatrical performance, or any intellectualization during the moments when the sword is doing its brutal but necessary work, or any squeamishness or guilt or revulsion, creates the two-mindedness against which Hagbard so vehemently warns in Never Whistle While You're Pissing. In a sense, only the mind dies. \r\n12 See Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life.\r\n


Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes. Goethe wrote maxims like these precisely at the time when the individual lost the protective cover of traditional society and daily life became a problem for him. He no longer knew what were the proper doses of experience. This safe dosage of life is exactly what is prescribed by traditional custom, wherein all the important decisions of life and even its daily events are ritually marked out. Neurosis is the contriving of private obsessional ritual to replace the socially-agreed one now lost by the demise of traditional society. The customs and myths of traditional society provided a whole interpretation of the meaning of life, ready-made for the individual; all he had to do was to accept living it as true.


Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes. Goethe wrote maxims like these precisely at the time when the individual lost the protective cover of traditional society and daily life became a problem for him. He no longer knew what were the proper doses of experience. This safe dosage of life is exactly what is prescribed by traditional custom, wherein all the important decisions of life and even its daily events are ritually marked out. Neurosis is the contriving of private obsessional ritual to replace the socially-agreed one now lost by the demise of traditional society. The customs and myths of traditional society provided a whole interpretation of the meaning of life, ready-made for the individual; all he had to do was to accept living it as true.


If history is a succession of immortality ideologies, then the problems of men can be read directly against those ideologies—how embracing they are, how convincing, how easy they make it for men to be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man’s hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism. Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.27 The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel’s famous observation on how the Salpêtrière mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.


The body, then, is one’s animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems, why Freud saw that sex was so prominent in human life—especially in the neurotic conflicts of his patients. Sex is an inevitable component of man’s confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate). No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body—as a material thing—cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation. This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced—say, in traditional France—and at the same time is so disillusioning. It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.24 If the adult reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality, he repeats the fetishization of the child who focusses the problem of the mother upon her genitals. Sex then becomes a screen for terror, a fetishization of full consciousness about the real problem of life.


Author: P.D. Ouspensky
Publisher: Vintage (1971)

One of the most important things in every kind of school is the idea of rules. If there are no rules, there is no school. Not even an imitation school can exist without rules. If it is an imitation school there will be imitation rules, but there must be some kind of rules. One definition of a school is that it is a certain number of people who accept and follow certain rules. Rules are not for convenience, they are not for comfort— they are for inconvenience and discomfort, and in that way they help self remembering. You must understand that all rules are for self-remembering, although they also have a purpose in themselves. If there are no rules and the importance of rules is not understood, there is no work. The important thing to realize about rules is that there is really only one rule, or it is better to say one principle—that one must not do anything unnecessary. Now try to understand that Why cannot we 'do' in the right sense? Because we do so many unnecessary things Every moment of our life we do hundreds of unnecessary things, and because of that we cannot 'do' and must first learn not to do anything unnecessary. First we must learn not to do unnecessary things in relation to the work, and later in connection with our own lives. It may take a long time, but this is the way to learn. You must do this, you must not do that; this is all specifications, but there is only one rule. Until you understand this fundamental rule, you have to try to follow other rules which are given. Rules are particularly important in connection with organization of groups, because, since people come without knowing one another and without knowing what it is all about, certain rules have to be imposed. For instance, one of the rules that applies to new people is that they should not talk to people outside about what they hear at lectures. People begin to realize the importance of this rule only when this form of talk turns against them, when their friends insist on their talking and they no longer want to talk. This rule is to help people not to lie, because when they speak about things they do not know, they naturally begin to lie. So if, after listening to one or two lectures, people begin to talk about what they have heard and express their opinions, they begin to lie. Most people are too impatient, they do not give themselves enough time, they come to conclusions too soon and so cannot help lying. But the chief reason for this rule is that it is a principle of school-work not to give ideas but to keep them from people, and to give them only on certain conditions which safeguard them from being distorted. Otherwise they will be distorted the next day; we have had enough experience of that. It is very important to prevent these ideas from deteriorating, because it may be said that a school is something where people and ideas do not die. In life both people and ideas die, not at once, but die slowly. Another reason for this rule is that it is a test, an exercise of will, an exercise of memory and understanding. You come here on certain conditions; the first condition is that you must not talk, and you must remember it. This helps enormously to self remember, because it goes against all ordinary habits. Your ordinary habit is to talk without discrimination. But in relation to these ideas you must discriminate


Q. I think I have not got the right idea about identification. Does it mean that things control us and not that we control things? \nA. Identification is a very difficult thing to describe, because no definitions are possible. Such as we are we are never free from identifying. If we believe that we do not identify with something, we are identified with the idea that we are not identified. You cannot describe identification in logical terms. You have to find a moment of identification, catch it, and then compare things with that moment. Identification is everywhere, at every moment of ordinary life. When you begin self-observation, some forms of identification already become impossible. But in ordinary life almost everything is identification. It is a very important psychological feature that permeates the whole of our life, and we do not notice it because we are in it. The best way to understand it is to find some examples. For instance, if you see a cat with a rabbit or a mouse — this is identification. Then find analogies to this picture in yourself. Only, you must understand that it is there every moment, not only at exceptional moments. Identification is an almost permanent state in us. You must be able to see this state apart from yourself, separate it from yourself, and that can only be done by trying to become more conscious, trying to remember yourself, to be aware of yourself. Only when you become more aware of yourself are you able to struggle with manifestations like identification. \n\nQ. I find when I am identified it is nearly always with things inside me. \nA. Perhaps you are right; perhaps you are not right. You may think you are identified with one thing when in reality you are identified with quite a different thing. This does not matter at all; what matters is the state of identification. In the state of identification you cannot feel right, see right, judge right. But the subject of identification is not important: the result is the same. \n\nQ. So what is the way to overcome identification? \nA. That is another thing. It is different in different cases. First it is necessary to see; then it is necessary to put something against it. \n\nQ. What do you mean by 'put something against it'? \nA. Just turn your attention to something more important. You must learn to distinguish the important from the less important, and if you turn your attention to more important things you become less identified with unimportant things. You must realize that identification can never help you; it only makes things more confused and more difficult. If you realize even that—that alone may help in some cases. People think that to be identified helps them, they do not see that it only makes things more difficult. It has no useful energy at all, only destructive energy. \n\nQ. Is identification mainly emotion? \nA. It always has an emotional element—a kind of emotional disturbance, but sometimes it becomes a habit, so that one does not even notice the emotion. \n\nQ. I realize that it is important to be emotional in the right way, but when I feel something emotionally in the work, I soon destroy the whole thing. \nA. Only identification is destructive. Emotion can only give new energy, new understanding. You take identification for emotion. You do not know emotion without identification, so, in the beginning, you cannot visualize an emotion free from it. People often think they speak about an emotional function when in reality they speak about identification. \n\nQ. Is it possible for us, as we are now, to have any feeling at all without identifying? \nA. Very difficult, unless we begin to watch ourselves. Then easy kinds of identification—I mean easy individually—will respond to treatment. But everyone has his own specialties in identification. For instance, it is easy for me not to identify with music, for another it may be very difficult. \n\nQ. Is love without identification possible? \nA. I would say love is impossible with identification. Identification kills all emotions, except negative emotions. With identification only the unpleasant side remains. \n\nQ. Non-identifying does not mean aloofness? \nA. On the contrary, aloofness needs identification. Non-identifying is quite a different thing. \n\nQ. If you are identified with an idea, how can you stop it? \nA. First by understanding what identification means and then by trying to remember yourself. Begin with simple cases, then later you can deal with the more difficult. \n\nQ. As you develop self-remembering do you acquire a sort of detached attitude, more free from identification? \nA. Detached attitude in the sense that you know your attitudes better; you know what is useful to you and what is not useful. If you do not remember yourself it is easy to make a mistake about it. For instance, one can undertake some kind of study that is really quite useless. Self-remembering helps understanding, and understanding always means bringing everything to a certain centre. You must have a central point in all your work, in all your attitudes, and self-remembering is a necessary condition for that. We must talk more about identifying if it is not clear. It will become more clear when you find two or three good examples. It is a certain state in which you are in the power of things. \n\nQ. If I look closely and think deeply, does it mean I have become identified? \nA. No, identifying is a special thing, it means losing oneself. As I said, it is not so much a question of what one is identified with. Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-tray. This often happens in pathological states, and a pathological state is only an intensified ordinary state. You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you. \n\nQ. Can we have any understanding with identification? \nA. How much can you understand in deep sleep, which is what identification is? If you remember your aim, realize your position and see the danger of sleep, it will help you to sleep less. \n\nQ. What is the difference between sympathy and identification? \nA. It is quite another thing; it is a normal and legitimate emotion and can exist without identification. There may be sympathy without identification and sympathy with identification. When sympathy is mixed with identification, it often ends in anger or another negative emotion. \n\nQ. You spoke of losing oneself in identification. Which self? \nA. All, everything. Identifying is a very interesting idea. There are two stages in the process of identifying. The first stage denotes the process of becoming identified, the second a state when identification is complete. \n\nQ. The first stage is quite harmless? \nA. If it attracts too much attention and occupies too much time, it leads to the second. \n\nQ. When you desire something, can you desire it without identification? \nA. Identification is not obligatory. But if you desire to hit someone, you cannot do it without identification; if identification disappears, you do not want to any longer. It is possible not to lose oneself; losing oneself is not a necessary element at all. \n\nQ. Is it possible to identify with two things at once? \nA With ten thousand! It is necessary to observe and observe. From one point of view struggling with identification is not so difficult, because, if we can see it, it becomes so ridiculous that we cannot remain identified. Other people's identification always seems ridiculous and ours may become so too. Laughter may be useful in this respect if we can turn it on ourselves. \n\nQ. I cannot see why identification is a bad thing. \nA. Identification is a bad thing if you want to awake, but if you want to sleep, then it is a good thing. \n\nQ. Would not everything we do suffer if we kept our minds on keeping awake instead of attending to what we are doing? \nA. I have already explained that it is quite the opposite. We can do well whatever we are doing only as much as we are awake. The more we are asleep, the worse we do the thing we are doing—there are no exceptions. You take it academically, simply as a word, but between deep sleep and complete awakening there are different degrees, and you pass from one degree to another. \n\nQ. If we feel more awake, we should not overtax these moments, should we? \nA. How can we overtax them? These moments are too short even if we have glimpses. We can only try not to forget them and act in accordance with these moments. This is all we can do. \n\nQ. Can you say that identification is being in the grip of something, not being able to shake off some idea in mind? \nA. Being in the grip of things is an extreme case. There are many small identifications which are very difficult to observe, and these are the most important because they keep us mechanical. We must realize that we always pass from one identification to another. If a man looks at a wall, he is identified with the wall. \n\nQ. How does identification diner from associations? \nA. Associations are quite another thing; they can be more controlled or less controlled, but they have nothing to do with identification. Different associations are a necessary part of thinking; we define things by associations and we do everything with the help of associations. \n\nQ. I cannot see why an 'I' changes. Can the cause always be seen in some identification? \nA. It is always by associations. A certain number of 'I's try to push their way to the front, so as soon as one loses oneself in one of them it is replaced by another. We think that 'I's are just passive, indifferent things, but emotions, associations, memories, always work. That is why it is useful to stop thinking, even occasionally, as an exercise. Then you will begin to see how difficult it is to do it. Your question simply shows that you have never tried, otherwise you would know. \n\nQ. Is concentration identification? \nA. Concentration is controlled action; identification controls you. \n\nQ. Is concentration possible for us? \nA. There are degrees. Intentional concentration for half an hour is impossible. If we could concentrate without external help, we would be conscious. But everything has degrees. \n\nQ. Is the beginning of a new observation identification with the object you observe? \nA. Identification happens when you are repelled or attracted by something. Study or observation does not necessarily produce identification, but attraction and repulsion always does. Also, we use too strong a language, and this automatically produces identification. We have many automatic appliances of this sort. \n\nQ. What can I do about identification? I feel that I always lose myself in whatever I do. It does not seem possible to be different. \nA. No, it is possible. If you have to do something, you have to do it, but you may identify more or identify less. There is nothing hopeless in it so long as you remember about it. Try to observe; you do not always identify to the same extent; sometimes you identify so that you can see nothing else, at other times you can see something. If things were always the same, there would be no chance for us, but they always vary in degree of intensity, and that gives a possibility of change. Everything we do, we have to learn in advance. If you want to drive a car, you have to learn beforehand. If you work now, in time you will have more control. \n\nQ. Why is it wrong to be completely absorbed in one's work? \nA. It will be bad work. If you are identified, you can never get good results. It is one of our illusions to think that we must lose ourselves to get good results, for in this way we only get poor results. When one is identified, one does not exist; only the thing exists with which one is identified. \n\nQ. Is the aim of non-identifying to free the mind from the object? \nA. The aim is to awake. Identifying is a feature of sleep; identified mind is asleep. Freedom from identifying is one of the sides of awakening. A state where identifying does not exist is quite possible, but we do not observe it in life and we do not notice that we are constantly identified. Identifying cannot disappear by itself; struggle is necessary. \n\nQ. How can anyone awake if identification is universal? \nA. One can only awake as a result of effort, of struggle against it. But first one must understand what to identify means. As in everything else, so in identification there are degrees. In observing oneself one finds when one is more identified, less identified or not identified at all. If one wants to awake, one must and can get free from identification. As we are, every moment of our life we are lost, we are never free, because we identify. \n\nQ. Can you give an example of identification? \nA. We identify all the time, that is why it is difficult to give an example. For instance, take likes and dislikes, they all mean identification, especially dislikes. They cannot exist without identification and generally they are nothing but identification. Usually people imagine that they have many more dislikes than they actually have. If they investigate and analyse them, they will probably find that they only dislike one or two things. When I studied it, there was only one real dislike that I could find in myself. But you must find your own examples; it must be verified by personal experience. If at a moment of a strong identification you try to stop it, you will see the idea. \n\nQ. But I still do not understand what it is! \nA. Let us try from the intellectual side. You realize that you do not remember yourself? Try to see why you cannot and you will find that identification prevents you. Then you will see what it is. All these things are connected. \n\nQ. Is non-identifying the only way to know what identifying is? \nA. No, as I explained, by observing it, because it is not always the same. We do not notice the temperature of our body except when it becomes a little higher or lower than normal. In the same way we can notice identification when it is stronger or weaker than usual. By comparing these degrees we can see what it is. \n\nQ. In struggling with identification is it necessary to know why one is identified? \nA. One is identified not for any particular reason or purpose, but in all cases because one cannot help it. How can you know why you identify? But you must know why you struggle. This is the thing. If you do not forget the reason why, you will be ten times more successful. Very often we begin struggling and then forget why. There are many forms of identification, but the first step is to see it; the second step is to struggle with it in order to become free from it. As I said, it is a process, not a moment; we are in it all the time. We spend our energy in the wrong way on identification and negative emotions; they are open taps from which our energy flows out. \n\nQ. Can one suddenly change the energy of anger into something else? One has tremendous energy at these moments. \nA. One has tremendous energy, and it works by itself, without control, and makes one act in a certain way. Why? What is the connecting link? Identification is the link. Stop identification and you will have this energy at your disposal. How can you do this? Not at once; it needs practice at easier moments. When emotion is very strong you cannot do it. It is necessary to know more, to be prepared. If you know how not to identify at the right moment, you will have great energy at your disposal. What you do with it is another thing; you may lose it again on something quite useless. But it needs practice. You cannot learn to swim when you fall into the sea during a storm— you must learn in calm water. Then, if you fall in, you may perhaps be able to swim. I repeat again: it is impossible to be conscious if you are identified. This is one of the difficulties that comes later, because people have some favourite identifications which they do not want to give up, and at the same time they say they want to be conscious. The two things cannot go together. There are many incompatible things in life, and identification and consciousness are two of the most incompatible. \n\nQ. How can one avoid the reaction which comes after feeling very enthusiastic? Is it due to identification? \nA. Yes, this reaction comes as a result of identification. Struggle with identification will prevent it from happening. It is not what you call enthusiasm that produces the reaction, but the identification. Identification is always followed by this reaction. \n\nQ. Is a bored man identified with nothing? \nA. Boredom is also identification—one of the biggest. It is identification with oneself, with something in oneself. \n\nQ. It seems to me I cannot study a person without losing myself in him or her, yet I understand that this is wrong? \nA. It is a wrong idea that one cannot study a person or anything else without losing oneself. If you lose yourself in anything, you cannot study it. Identifying is always a weakening element: the more you identify the worse your study is and the smaller the results. You may remember that in the first lecture I said that identifying with people takes the form of considering. There are two kinds of considering: internal and external. Internal considering is the same as identifying. External considering needs a certain amount of self-remembering; it means taking into account other people's weaknesses, putting oneself in their place. Often in life it is described by the word 'tact'; only tact may be educated or accidental. External considering means control. If we learn to use it consciously, it will give us a possibility of control. Internal considering is when we feel that people do not give us enough, do not appreciate us enough. If one considers internally one misses moments of external considering. External considering must be cultivated, internal considering must be eliminated. But first observe and see how often you miss moments of external considering and what an enormous role internal considering plays in life. Study of internal considering, of mechanicalness, of lying, of imagination, of identification shows that they all belong to us, that we are always in these states. When you see this, you realize the difficulty of work on oneself. Such as you are you cannot begin to get something new; you will see that first you must scrub the machine clean; it is too covered with rust. We think we are what we are. Unfortunately we are not what we are but what we have become; we are not natural beings. We are too asleep, we lie too much, we live too much in imagination, we identify too much. We think we have to do with real beings, but in reality we have to do with imaginary beings. Almost all we know about ourselves is imaginary. Beneath all this agglomeration man is quite different. We have many imaginary things we must throw off before we can come to real things. So long as we live in imaginary things, we cannot see the value of the real; and only when we come to real things in ourselves can we see what is real outside us. We have too much accidental growth in us. \n\nQ. If one retired from the world, surely one would overcome identification, considering and negative emotion? \nA. This question is often asked, but one cannot be at all sure that it would be easier. Besides you can find descriptions in literature of how people attained a very high degree of development in seclusion, but when they came in contact with other people they at once lost all they had gained. In schools of the Fourth Way it was found that the best conditions for study and work on oneself are a man's ordinary conditions of life, because from one point of view these conditions are easier and from another they are the most difficult. So if a man gets something in these conditions he will keep it in all conditions, whereas if he gets it in special conditions he will lose it in other conditions.


Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1983)

The only cure for depression is suicide.



This is not meant as a bad joke, but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it.



This treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated.



Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied. You are treated. You apply to friend, counselor, physician, minister, group. You take a trip, take anti-depressant drugs, change jobs, change wife or husband or 'sexual partner.'



Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption.



Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.



Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to become any of these?



Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket. Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference.



If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.



Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.



Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can't believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship who captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick - over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.



And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out - or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.



The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.