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Showing 80 similar quotes for quote #40 from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

393

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary. The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened. The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men. Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole. By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon. Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

114

Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the creative magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord. With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace. We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world. Other myths dwell on the 'effortlessness' of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the 'everlastingness,' the deathlessness, of such an existence.

Enchiridion

Author: Epictetus, George Long (Translator)

Publisher: Prometheus Books (1991)

Ride the Tiger

Author: Julius Evola

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure. This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap—in the worst of all double-binds—seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil, and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love. Your first reaction may be simply, 'To hell with it!' The only course may seem to be to forget the whole effort and become absorbed in trivialities, or to check out of the game by suicide or psychosis, and spend the rest of your days blabbering in an asylum. But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-binds and all moves self-defeating? Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. The sense of paralysis is therefore the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is a fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. The sense of 'I,' which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe. In the preceding chapter we saw that this unity of organism and environment is a physical fact. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety. One need not, then, fall into the trap which this experience holds for believers in an external, all-powerful God—the temptation to feel 'I am God' in that sense, and to expect to be worshipped and obeyed by all other organisms. Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various 'spiritual exercises' in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to 'get' some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to 'get culture' or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. If, then, you ask me how to get beyond the ego-feeling, I shall ask you why you want to get there. If you give me the honest answer, which is that your ego will feel better in the 'higher spiritual status' of self-transcendence, you will thus realize that you—as ego—are a fake. You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense ... around nothing. You can't even want to get rid of it, nor yet want to want to. Understanding this, you will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with—perhaps—a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. At this point, the ego may reassert itself with the insidious 'I-can't-help-myself' play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim. 'See, I'm only a bundle of conditioned reflexes, so you mustn't get angry with me for acting just as I feel.' (To which the answer could be, 'Well, we're just zombies too, so you shouldn't complain if we get angry.') But who is it that mustn't get angry or shouldn't complain, as if there were still some choice in the matter? The ego is still surviving as the 'I' which must passively endure the automatic behavior of 'myself' and others—again, as if there were some choice which the witnessing self can make between putting up with things and attacking them violently. What has happened is that the frustrated ego has withdrawn into its last stronghold of independence, retaining its identity as a mere watcher, or sufferer, of all that goes on. Here it pities itself or consoles itself as a puppet of fate. But if this is seen as yet another subterfuge, we are close to the final showdown. A line of separation is now drawn between everything that happens to me, including my own feelings, on the one side, and on the other, I myself as the conscious witness. Isn't it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism's feedback, or self-conscious mechanism? If, then, there is no choice in what happens to me, on one side of the line, there is equally no choice on the other, on the witnessing side, as to whether I should accept what happens or reject it. I accept, I reject, I witness just as automatically as things happen or as my emotions reflect my physiological chemistry. Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is not fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its 'parts,' are doing—that is, of its behavior—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog. It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out 'how they are made.' This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitive and unreliable science of astrology—as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's, character or soul, he draws a horoscope—that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment—social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical—throughout every moment of his life.

Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or 'ground' of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, 'myth' is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, 'myth' is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet 'myth,' in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. \n\nMyth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: 'Where did the world come from?' 'Why did God make the world?' 'Where was I before I was born?' 'Where do people go when they die?' Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: \n\n>There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black. \n\n>In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place. \n\n>God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. \n\n>Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. \n\n>Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. \n\n>God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. \n\n>You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

100

Obviously, it takes discipline to make any radical change in one's own behavior patterns, and psychotherapy can drag on for years and years. But this is not my suggestion. Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as 'Your Honor' or 'Mi Lud,' without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this. He plays the role of judge all the better for realizing that on the next turn of the Wheel of Fortune he may be the accused, and that if all the truth were known, he would be standing there now. If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior, or to pluck out evil root and branch.

When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it—as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead,of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it. You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing—for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound. Yet what would we think of a society which had no place for music, which did not allow for dancing, or for any activity not directly involved with the practical problems of survival? Obviously, such a society would be surviving to no purpose— unless it could somehow make a delight out of the 'essential tasks' of farming, building, soldiering, manufacturing, or cooking. But in that moment the goal of survival is forgotten. The tasks are being done for their own sake, whereupon farms begin to look like gardens, sensible living-boxes sprout interesting roofs and mysterious ornaments, arms are engraved with curious patterns, carpenters take time to 'finish' their work, and cooks become gourmets.

the difficulty of understanding the organism/environment polarity is psychological. The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere 'creatures' who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the 'harmony of contained conflicts' in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving 'I' as a dis content ed and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone. We have attained a view of the world and a type of sanity which is dried-out like a rusty beer-can on the beach. It is a world of objects, of nothing-buts as ordinary as a formica table with chromium fittings. We find it immensely reassuring—except that it won't stay put, and must therefore be defended even at the cost of scouring the whole planet back to a nice clean rock. For life is, after all, a rather messy and gooey accident in our basically geological universe. 'If a man's son ask for bread, will he give him a stone?' The answer is probably, 'Yes.

In times past, recognition of the impermanence of the world usually led to withdrawal. On the one hand, ascetics, monks, and hermits tried to exorcise their desires so as to regard the world with benign resignation, or to draw back and back into the depths of consciousness to become one with the Self in its unmanifest state of eternal serenity. On the other hand, others felt that the world was a state of probation where material goods were to be used in a spirit of stewardship, as loans from the Almighty, and where the main work of life is loving devotion to God and to man. Yet both these responses are based on the initial supposition that the individual is the separate ego, and because this supposition is the work of a double-bind any task undertaken on this basis—including religion—will be self-defeating. Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real 'I' is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow 'outside' or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect Being. The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning. For this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love and, for angels and men at least, he has planned an everlasting life of the purest bliss which is to begin at the end of mortal time. But of course there are strings attached to this reward, and those who purposely and relentlessly deny or disobey the divine will must spend eternity in agonies as intense as the bliss of good and faithful subjects. The problem of this image of God was that it became too much of a good thing. Children working at their desks in school are almost always put off when even a kindly and respected teacher watches over their shoulders. How much more disconcerting to realize that each single deed, thought, and feeling is watched by the Teacher of teachers, that nowhere on earth or in heaven is there any hiding-place from that Eye which sees all and judges all. To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image and to assert that the hypothesis of God was of no help in describing or predicting the course of nature. If everything, they said, was the creation and the operation of God, the statement had no more logic than 'Everything is up.' But, as, so often happens, when one tyrant is dethroned, a worse takes his place. The Crackpot Myth was retained without the Potter. The world was still understood as an artifact, but on the model of an automatic machine. The laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker. According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters. In this fully Automatic Model of the universe shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. It is most strongly emphasized in this myth that matter is brute and energy blind, that all nature outside human, and some animal, skins is a profoundly stupid and insensitive mechanism. Those who continued to believe in Someone-Up-There-Who-Cares were ridiculed as woolly-minded wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face man's grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was disconcerting, relief in getting rid of him was short-lived. He was replaced by the Cosmic Idiot, and people began to feel more estranged from the universe than ever. This situation merely reinforced the illusion of the loneliness and separateness of the ego (now a 'mental mechanism') and people calling themselves naturalists began the biggest war on nature ever waged. In one form or another, the myth of the Fully Automatic Model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past—despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik— victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible. Nevertheless it remains a myth, with all the positive and negative features of myth as an image used for making sense of the world. It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.

I believe,' said Tertullian of Christianity, 'because it is absurd.' People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way 'up there.' We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. But, he continues— Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts... 'the Ultimate Ground of Being,' he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. (2) 'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT! Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.

The Bakhtin Reader

Author: Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, Pam Morris (Editor)

Publisher: Arnold (2001)

51-52

Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that very reality. Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like. In this sense, the reality of the sign is fully objective and lends itself to a unitary, monistic, objective method of study. A sign is a phenomenon of the external world. Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces (all those actions, reactions and new signs it elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience. \nThis is a point of extreme importance. Yet, elementary and self-evident as it may seem, the study of ideologies has still not drawn all the conclusions that follow from it. \nThe idealistic philosophy of culture and psychologistic cultural studies locate ideology in the consciousness. Ideology, they assert, is a fact of consciousness; the external body of the sign is merely a coating, merely a technical means for the realization of the inner effect, which is understanding. \nIdealism and psychologism alike overlook the fact that understanding itself can come about only within some kind of semiotic material (e.g., inner speech), that sign bears upon sign, that consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs. The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs. And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs. \nThis ideological chain stretches from individual consciousness to individual consciousness, connecting them together. Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another. And the individual consciousness itself is filled with signs. Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction... \nSigns can arise only on interindividual territory. It is territory that cannot be called 'natural' in the direct sense of the word: signs do not arise between two members of the species Homo sapiens. It is essential that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them. The individual consciousness not only cannot be used to explain anything, but, on the contrary, is itself in need of explanation from the vantage point of the social, ideological medium. \n*The individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact*. Not until this point is recognized with due provision for all the consequences that follow from it will it be possible to construct either an objective psychology of an objective study of ideologies... \nNo cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness. It is in the capacity of the consciousness to find verbal access to it. Thus, as it were, spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances form around each and every ideological sign. Every ideological refraction of existence in process of generation, no matter what the nature of its significant material, is accompanied by ideological refraction in word as an obligatory concomitant phenomenon. \n

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

...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.

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.

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.

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

31-32

Each church has a particular sin, each a a characteristic flaw in a time of transition to a new belief system, a new level of consciousness. In one town, Ephesus (2:1-7), the people no longer cling to a central belief; 'thou has left thy first love.' But to those who overcome their fears and return to their deeper beliefs, 'to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God' (2:7). \r\n\r\nAnother church, Pergamos (2:12-17), is composed of those who may hold to their beliefs inwardly, but are content to sit silently and watch as others do evil. The people of still another city, Thyatira (2:8-29), have listened to a false prophet (Jezebel) and followed her teachings instead of God's. The congregation of another church, Sardis (3:1-6), with no hope for the future, choose to live only for the day and turned to dissolution. Another city, Laodicea (3:14-22), in some ways the most condemned by the alpha and omega, is composed of the wishy-washy, the lukewarm, neither accepting nor rejecting anything anymore, content merely to go whichever way the wind blows. \r\n\r\nAnother church, Smyrna (2:8-11), is composed of those who are suffering greatly in these times, but manage to hold to their faith, even though others persecute them. They are already suffering martyrdom for their beliefs because of the sins of others in their midst: 'the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan' (2:9). The alpha and omega reassures the faithful of Smyrna: Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer...be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life (2:10). \r\n\r\nHowever, only one city, Philadelphia (3:7-13), has fully satisfied God. The people there have never deserted their faith; nor have they yielded to dissolution. They have seen the new way opening before them and have already started to make a transition to the new. Therefore, alone among the cities, their people will not suffer and will not be exposed to temptation.

The RICH Economy

Author: Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Ronin Publishing, Inc (1980)

If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. 'A cure for unemployment' is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left. \r\n \r\nI would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society. \r\n \r\nThe inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40's and '50's. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. Atomic fission does more with a cubic centimeter of matter than all the engineers of the 19th Century could do with a million tons, and fusion does even more. \r\n \r\n*Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no 'cure.'* \r\n \r\nThis tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is based on two principal factors, viz: \r\n \r\nThe increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H. Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do separately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon; a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less becomes increasingly possible. \r\n\r\nKnowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery 'suggests' further discoveries; every innovation provokes further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents granted every year than were granted the year before, in a rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. If Inventor A can make a Whatsit out of 20 moving parts, Inventor B will come along and build a Whatsit out of 10 moving parts. If the technology of 1900 can get 100 ergs out of a Whatchamacallum, the technology of 1950 can get 1,000 ergs. Again, the tendency is always toward doing-more-with-less. \r\n \r\nUnemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary. \r\n \r\nAristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called 'wage slavery' by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving. \r\n \r\nIt is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a 'disease' and cannot imagine a 'cure' for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create. \r\n \r\nSuppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work -- as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure. \r\n \r\n'But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?' \r\n \r\nNot at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples. \r\n \r\nThe National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. Estimates differ as to how much this would be for each citizen, but at the current level of the GNP it is conservative to say that a share would be worth several times as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five times more. Critics complain that this would be inflationary. Supporters of the National Dividend reply that it would only be inflationary if the dividends distributed were more than the GNP; and they are proposing only to issue dividends equal to the GNP. \r\n\r\nThe Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference. This plan would definitely cost the government less than the present welfare system, with all its bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth considering for those conservatives who are always complaining about the high cost of welfare. It would also spare the recipients the humiliation, degradation and dehumanization built into the present welfare system: a point for liberals to consider. A system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to anybody but hardcore sadists. \r\n \r\nThe Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. Friedman, who is sometimes called a conservative but prefers to title himself a libertarian, points out that this would cost 'the government' (i.e. the taxpayers) less than the present welfare system, like Theobald's Guaranteed Annual Income. It would also dispense with the last tinge of humiliation associated with government 'charity,' since when you cashed a check from IRS nobody (not even your banker) would know if it was supplementary income due to poverty or a refund due to overpayment of last year's taxes. \r\n \r\nThe RICH Economy. This was devised by inventor L. Wayne Benner (co-author with Timothy Leary of Terra II) in collaboration with the present author. It's a four-stage program to retool society for the cybernetic and space-age future we are rapidly entering. RICH means Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.\r\n \r\n*Stage I* is to recognize that cybernation and massive unemployment are inevitable and to encourage them. This can be done by offering a $100,000 reward to any worker who can design a machine that will replace him or her, and all others doing the same work. In other words, instead of being dragged into the cybernetic age kicking and screaming, we should charge ahead bravely, regarding the Toilless Society as the Utopian goal humanity has always sought. \r\n \r\n*Stage II* is to establish either the Negative Income Tax or the Guaranteed Annual Income, so that the massive unemployment caused by Stage I will not throw hordes of people into the degradation of the present welfare system.\r\n \r\n*Stage III* is to gradually, experimentally, raise the Guaranteed Annual Income to the level of the National Dividend suggested by Douglas, Bucky Fuller, and Ezra Pound, which would give every citizen the approximate living standard of the comfortable middle class. The reason for doing this gradually is to pacify those conservative economists who claim that the National Dividend is 'inflationary' or would be practically wrecking the banking business by lowering the interest rate to near-zero. It is our claim that this would not happen as long as the total dividends distributed to the populace equaled the Gross National Product. but since this is a revolutionary and controversial idea, it would be prudent, we allow, to approach it in slow steps, raising the minimum income perhaps 5 per cent per year for the first ten years. And, after the massive cybernation caused by Stage I has produced a glut of consumer goods, experimentally raise it further and faster toward the level of a true National Dividend. \r\n \r\n*Stage IV* is a massive investment in adult education, for two reasons.\r\n\r\nPeople can spend only so much time fucking, smoking dope, and watching TV; after a while they get bored. This is the main psychological objection to the workless society, and the answer to it is to educate people for functions more cerebral than fucking, smoking dope, watching TV, or the idiot jobs most are currently toiling at. \r\n \r\nThere are vast challenges and opportunities confronting us in the next three or four decades, of which the most notable are those highlighted in Tim Leary's SMI2LE slogan -- Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension. Humanity is about to enter an entirely new evolutionary relationship to space, time, and consciousness. We will no longer be limited to one planet, to a brief, less-than-a-century lifespan, and to the stereotyped and robotic mental processes by which most people currently govern their lives. Everybody deserves the chance, if they want it, to participate in the evolutionary leap to what Leary calls 'more space, more time, and more intelligence to enjoy space and time.'\r\n \r\nWhat I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. A Work Esthetic will have to arise to replace this old Stone Age syndrome of the slave, the peasant, the serf, the prole, the wage-worker -- the human labor-machine who is not fully a person but, as Marx said, ' a tool, an automaton.' Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity -- as an outlet for their creative potential.\r\n \r\n ('Creative potential' is not a panchreston. It refers to the inborn drive to play, to tinker, to explore, and to experiment, shown by every child before his or her mental processes are stunted by authoritarian education and operant-conditioned wage-robotry.)\r\n \r\nAs Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, 'What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?' The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

430

Of course these scientisms about man begin with something that is true. That nutrition can improve health both of mind and body is true. The class struggle as Marx studied it in the France of Louis Napoleon was a fact. The relief of hysterical symptoms in a few patients by analysis of sexual memories probably happened. And hungry animals or anxious men certainly will learn instrumental responses for food or approbation. These are true facts. But so is the shape of a liver of a sacrificed animal a true fact. And so the Ascendants and Midheavens of astrologers, or the shape of oil on water. Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions. A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know. Like the entrails of animals or the flights of birds, such scientistic superstitions become the preserved ritualized places where we may read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers that can authorize our actions. Science then, for all its pomp of factness, is not unlike some of the more easily disparaged outbreaks of pseudoreligions. In this period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrational-isms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause. In the frustrations and sweat of laboratories, it feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did the Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry Sinais of parched fact for some rich and brave significance flowing with truth and exaltation. And all of this, my metaphor and all, is a part of this transitional period after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

335

Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons. The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon j he just talks like one. Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet. As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god.

227

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.

Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In a certain sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the identification of understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind of obedience. Indeed, both words come from the same root and therefore were probably the same word originally. This is true in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Russian, as well as in English, where 'obey' comes from the Latin obedire, which is a composite of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.16 The problem is the control of such obedience. This is done in two ways. The first but less important is simply by spatial distance. Think, if you will, of what you do when hearing someone else talk to you. You adjust your distance to some culturally established standard.17 When the speaker is too close, it seems he is trying to control your thoughts too closely. When too far, he is not controlling them enough for you to understand him comfortably. If you are from an Arabian country, a face-to-face distance of less than twelve inches is comfortable. But in more northern 16 Straus, p. 229. 17 For those interested in pursuing this subject, see Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), which stresses the cultural differences, and Robert Sommer's Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), which examines spatial behavior in depth. 98 The Mind of Man countries, the conversation distance most comfortable is almost twice that, a cultural difference, which in social exchanges can result in a variety of international misunderstandings. To converse with someone at less than the usual distance means at least an attempted mutuality of obedience and control, as, for example, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face threatening of two men about to fight. To speak to someone within that distance is to attempt to truly dominate him or her. To be spoken to within that distance, and there remain, results in the strong tendency to accept the authority of the person who is speaking. The second and more important way that we control other people's voice-authority over us is by our opinions of them. Why are we forever judging, forever criticizing, forever putting people in categories of faint praise or reproof? We constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish to allow another's language power over you, simply hold him higher in your own private scale of esteem. And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods avail, because there is no person there, no point of space from which the voice emanates, a voice that you cannot back off from, as close to you as everything you call you, when its presence eludes all boundaries, when no escape is possible — flee and it flees with you — a voice unhindered by walls or distances, undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned out with anything, not even one's own screaming — how helpless the hearer!

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

In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior; 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.\n \nThus, 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.\n \nThe variables controlling excerption are deserving of much 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.\n \nHow 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.

...In the first instance we should say that the person suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I am calling reactivity, and they are therefore different things.\n\n This distinction is also important in normal everday life. We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture, since if I wish to walk, I will quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so.\n\n Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely conscious even of where I am. In writing, I am reacting to a pencil in my hand since I hold on to it, and am reacting to my writing pad since I hold it on my knees, and to its lines since I write upon them, but I am only conscious of what I am trying to say and whther or not I am being clear to you.\n\n If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.\n\n In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon. We are conscious of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas reactivity can be definded behaviorally and neuologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

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Here was a group of young men and women who had identified with Charles Manson and who lived in masochistic submission to him. They gave him their total devotion and looked upon him as a human god of some kind. In fact he filled the description of Freud’s “primal father”: he was authoritarian, very demanding of his followers, and a great believer in discipline. His eyes were intense, and for those who came under his spell there is no doubt that he projected a hypnotic aura. He was a very self-assured figure. He even had his own “truth,” his megalomanic vision for taking over the world. To his followers his vision seemed like a heroic mission in which they were privileged to participate. He had convinced them that only by following out his plan could they be saved. The “family” was very close, sexual inhibitions were nonexistent, and members had free access to each other. They even used sex freely for the purpose of attracting outsiders into the family. It seems obvious from all this that Manson combined the “fascinating effect of the narcissistic personality” with the “infectiousness of the unconflicted personality.” Everyone could freely drop his repressions under Manson’s example and command, not only in sex but in murder. The members of the “family” didn’t seem to show any remorse, guilt, or shame for their crimes. People were astonished by this ostensible “lack of human feeling.” But from the dynamics that we have been surveying, we are faced with the even more astonishing conclusion that homicidal communities like the Manson “family” are not really devoid of basic humanness. What makes them so terrible is that they exaggerate the dispositions present in us all. Why should they feel guilt or remorse? The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but “holy heroes.” They crave to serve in the powerful aura that he projects and to carry out the illusion that he provides them, an illusion that allows them to heroically transform the world. Under his hypnotic spell and with the full force of their own urges for heroic self-expansion, they need have no fear; they can kill with equanimity. In fact they seemed to feel that they were doing their victims “a favor,” which seems to mean that they sanctified them by including them in their own “holy mission.” As we have learned from the anthropological literature, the victim who is sacrificed becomes a holy offering to the gods, to nature, or to fate. The community gets more life by means of the victim’s death, and so the victim has the privilege of serving the world in the highest possible way by means of his own sacrificial death. One direct way, then, of understanding homicidal communities like the Manson family is to view them as magical transformations, wherein passive and empty people, torn with conflicts and guilt, earn their cheap heroism, really feeling that they can control fate and influence life and death. “Cheap” because not in their command, not with their own daring, and not in the grip of their own fears: everything is done with the leader’s image stamped on their psyche.

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Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude—even dishonor and betrayal—to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom—on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties—on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces and that he avoids partly by his guilty self-accusation. The answer is not far to seek: the depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling interaction, precisely because these people are his shelter, his strength, his protection against the world. Like most everyone else the depressed person is a coward who will not stand alone on his own center, who cannot draw from within himself the necessary strength to face up to life. So he embeds himself in others; he is sheltered by the necessary and willingly accepts it. But now his tragedy is plain to see: his necessity has become trivial, and so his slavish, dependent, depersonalized life has lost its meaning. It is frightening to be in such a bind. One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world. And thus the torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one’s failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worthwhileness out of it.‡

The historic value of Freud’s work is that it came to grips with the peculiar animal that man was, the animal that was not programmed by instincts to close off perception and assure automatic equanimity and forceful action. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. The hostility to psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie.

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?

The Role of Logo Design in Creating Brand Emotion

Author: Aslı Biricik

Publisher: İzmir Institute of Technology (2006)

Visually, attractive packaging using bright colours and clean designs mesmerises people, captivating them and enhancing their brand relationship. Unmistakable Absolut 14 Vodka, Apple iMac, and Gillette razors are brands that are focused on constantly introducing the fresh shapes and sensory experiences that consumers appreciate. 'Colour is a sensation and not a substance.' (Friedman 1947) And sensation runs within us, unlike products that run without. Products that transform into appealing sensations are the ones that win. Every emotional branding strategy must consider the effect (or the absence) colours will have on the brand. Colour is about conveying crucial information to consumers. “Colours trigger very specific responses in the central nervous system and celebral cortex. Once they affect the celebral cortex, colours can activate thoughts, memories, and particular modes of perception. This arousal prompts an increase in consumers’ ability to process information.” (Gobé 2001) Properly chosen colours obtain a more accurate understanding of the brand and provide consumers a better recall of the brand. The effect of colours arises both from cultural connections and physiology, and these influences are enforced by one another. Colours with long wavelengths are arousing. Red is the most stimulating colour that will attract the eye faster than any other. Colours with short wavelengths are soothing. Blue actually lowers blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rates. Yellow is in the middle of wavelengths detectable by the human eye. Therefore it is the brightest and easily attracts attention. This is the original reason for making the Yellow Pages yellow. Colour often sets the mood of a brand through logos and packaging. Generally, it is desirable to select a colour that is easily associated with the product. For example John Deere uses green for its tractors. Green implies nature. IBM has a solid blue that communicates stability and reliability. However as Al Ries and Jack Trout note in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, “it is more important to create a separate brand identity than it is to use the right symbolic colour. Hertz, the first car-rental brand, picked yellow. So Avis, the second brand, picked red. National went with green.” (Ries and Trout 1998) The role colour choice can play in brand identity is not to be underestimated. Colours can demand attention, provoke responses. An orange, translucent, curvaceous iMac screams, “fun” and “different”. Contrast that with a typical, gray, rectangular desktop that communicates a “utilitarian” and “standard” identity. Neither computer is necessarily functionally superior, but the iMac is distinguished. It is an emotional brand.

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

150

In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of his God -- which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said 'I' and then realized, 'I am all this world!' The first degree of such love is of servant to master: 'O Lord, you are the Master; I am thy servant. Command, and I shall obey!' This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world. The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such a love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gita between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Krishna. The next, or third, degree of love is that of parent for child, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one's heart the inward divine child of one's own awakened spiritual life -- in the sense of the mystic Meister Eckhart's words when he said to his congregation: 'It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.' And again: 'God's ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.' In Hinduism, it is in the popular worship of the naughty little 'butter thief,' Krishna the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated. And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, 'O Master, I do not find that I love God.' And he asked, 'Is there nothing, then, that you love?' To which she answered, 'My little nephew.' And he said to her, 'There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.' \r\n \r\nThe fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritual. In the words attributed to Jesus, 'The two shall be one flesh.' For the 'precious thing' then is no longer oneself, one's individual life, but the duad of each as both and the living of life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear there anything like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.) \r\n \r\nAnd so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one's place in the world, wealth, social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love's fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, 'O my Lord,' one can say, 'now reveal thyself!' and he will have to respond. \r\n \r\nThere is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands' beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss. \r\n \r\nThe underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships,

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One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian -- a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused -- because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love. \r\n\r\nNow it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other being! \r\n\r\nThe Persian poets have asked, 'By what power is Satan sustained?' And the answer that they have found is this: 'By his memory of the sound of God's voice when he said, 'Be gone!' ' What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!

The Magic Mountain

Author: Thomas Mann

Publisher: Vintage (1996)

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

372

Q. I could see myself losing my temper the other day when I was talking to somebody, but I could not stop it. How can I control temper? A This is an example of mechanicalness. You cannot control your temper when it has already begun to appear—it is then too late Struggle must begin in your mind, you must find your way to think rightly about a definite difficulty. Suppose you have to meet a certain man who irritates you. Your temper shows itself, you do not like it. How can you stop it? You must begin with the study of your thinking. What do you think about this man—not what you feel when you are irritated, but what do you think about him at quiet moments? You may find that in your mind you argue with him, you prove to him that he is wrong, you tell him all his mistakes, you find that, generally, he behaves wrongly towards you. This is where you are wrong You must learn to think rightly Then, if you do, it will happen like this although emotion is much quicker than thought, emotion is a temporary thing, but thought can be made continuous, so whenever the emotion jumps out, it hits against this continuous thought and cannot go on and manifest itself So you can struggle with the expression of negative emotions, as in this example, only by creating continuous right thinking. To explain what right thinking is in a few words is impossible, it is necessary to study it. If you remember what I said about parts of centres you will come to that, because in most cases and most conditions in ordinary life people think only with the mechanical part of the intellectual centre, which is the formatory apparatus This is not sufficient It is necessary to use the intellectual part of the intellectual centre Identifying is the chief reason why we do not use it Trying to self-remember and trying not to identify is the best means of passing into higher parts of centres. But we always forget about identification and about self remembering

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I think I had better tell you a story. It is an old story, told in the Moscow groups in 1916 about the origin of the system and the work and about self-remembering.—It happened in an unknown country at an unknown date that a sly man was walking past a cafe and met a devil. The devil was in very poor shape, both hungry and thirsty, so the sly man took him into the cafe, ordered some coffee and asked him what the trouble was. The devil said that there was no business. In the old days he used to buy souls and burn them to charcoal, because when people died they had very fat souls that he could take to hell, and all the devils were pleased. But now all the fires in hell were out, because when people died there were no souls. Then the sly man suggested that perhaps they could do some business together. 'Teach me how to make souls', he said, 'and I will give you a sign to show which people have souls made by me', and he ordered more coffee. The devil explained that he should teach people to remember themselves, not to identify and so on, and then, after some time, they would grow souls. The sly man set to work, organized groups and taught people to remember themselves. Some of them started to work seriously and tried to put into practice what he taught them. Then they died, and when they came to the gates of heaven, there was St Peter with his keys on one side and the devil on the other. When St Peter was ready to open the gates, the devil would say, 'May I just ask one question—did you remember yourself?' 'Yes, certainly', the man would answer and thereupon the devil would say, 'Excuse me, this soul is mine'. This went on for a long time, until they managed somehow to communicate to the earth what was happening at the gates of heaven. Hearing this, the people he was teaching came to the sly man and said, 'Why do you teach us to remember ourselves if, when we say we have remembered ourselves, the devil takes us?' The sly man asked, 'Did I teach you to say you remember yourselves? I taught you not to talk.' They said, 'But this was St Peter and the devil!' and the sly man said, 'But have you seen St Peter and the devil at groups? So do not talk. Some people did not talk and managed to get to heaven. I did not only make an arrangement with the devil, I also made a plan by which to deceive the devil

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Q. Why is it that some recurrent mistakes you may see, but cannot stop until somebody points them out to you? A. Even that will not help. You can go on doing it every day, until you find the cause. Maybe it depends on some other thing, and this thing on yet another thing and so on. For everything you want to change you must find the beginning. But we do not speak about change now, we only speak about study. Change goes further. Naturally, it you find something very obvious, you must try to change it, but this is mostly for self observation, because if something always happens in a mechanical way you cannot even observe it

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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

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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

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If we take school-work as an ascending octave, we know that in each octave there are two intervals or gaps, between mi and fa and between si and do. In order to pass through these gaps without changing the character or the line of the work it is necessary to know how to fill them. So if I want to guarantee the direction of the work in a straight line, I must work on three lines simultaneously. If I work only on one line, or on two lines, the direction will change. If I work on three lines, or three octaves, one line will help another to pass the interval by giving the necessary shock. It is very important to understand this. School-work uses many cosmic ideas, and three lines of work is a special arrangement to safeguard the right direction of the work and to make it successful. The first line is work on oneself: self-study, study of the system and trying to change at least the most mechanical manifestations. This is the most important line. The second line is work with other people. One cannot work by oneself; a certain friction, inconvenience and difficulty of working with other people creates the necessary shocks. The third line is work for the school, for the organization. This last line takes on different aspects for different people.

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with our will—the will of men No. 1, 2 and 3—we can only control one centre, using all the concentration possible for us. Yet centres are dependent on one another. Control of more than one centre can only be obtained if you put yourself under some other will, because your own will is insufficient, and this is why school discipline and school exercises are necessary. We have no real will; we only have self-will and wilfulness. If one understands that, one must have the courage to give up one's will. In a school special possibilities to give up one's will are made, so that if you give it up, later you may have your own will. But even without those special possibilities, if people watch themselves and are careful, they can catch moments when strong desire is present and ask themselves what they are to do in the light of the system. Everybody must find what his own situation is

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There is one very important principle in the work—you never have to work in accordance with your force, but always beyond your force. This is a permanent principle. In the work you always have to do more than you can; only then can you change. If you do only what is possible you will remain where you are. One has to do the impossible. You must not take the word 'impossible' on too big a scale, but even a little means much. This is different from life—in life you only do what is possible. It is necessary to put more energy into things—into self study, self-observation, self-remembering and all that. And in order to put more energy into your work it is necessary to find where it is being spent. You awake every morning with a certain amount of energy. It may be spent in many different ways. A certain amount is necessary for self-remembering, study of the system and so on. But if you spend this energy on other things, nothing remains for that. This is really the chief point. Try to calculate every morning how much energy you intend to put into work in comparison with other things. You will see that even in elementary things, simply in relation to time, you give very little to the work, if you give any at all, and all the rest is given to quite useless things. It is good if they are pleasant things, but in most cases they are not even pleasant. Lack of calculation, lack of these elementary statistics is the reason we do not understand why, with all our best intentions and best decisions, in the end we do nothing. How can we do anything if we do not give any energy or time to it? If you want to learn a language, you must learn a certain number of words every day and give some time to the study of grammar and so on. If you want to learn Russian and begin by learning five words a day, I will guarantee that you will never learn it. But if you learn two hundred words a day, in a few months you will understand Russian. It all depends on elementary statistics. In every kind of work or study there is a certain standard. If you give it a certain amount of energy and time, but just not enough, you will have no results. You will only turn round and round and remain approximately in the same place.

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Q. If man can 'do' nothing, does it follow that all he can do is to control his own mental reaction to events outside his control? A. Quite right. That is the beginning. If he learns to control his reactions, then after some time he will find that he can control more and more, and later it may happen that he will be able to control, again not all, for there is a very large gradation, but certain external events. But certain other external events cannot be controlled because they are of a different size.

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Q. Are vast amounts of internal friction and discomfort always a necessary preliminary to new development? \r\n \r\nA. That depends on people. For some people more may be necessary, for some less. Again, it depends on what you want. If you just want to study, it is enough to see, but if you want to change something it is not enough to look at it. Looking at a thing will not change it. Work means friction, conflict between 'yes' and 'no', between the part that wishes to work and the part that does not wish to work. There are many parts of us that do not wish to work, so the moment you begin to work friction starts. If I decide to do something and a part of me does not wish to do it, I must insist as much as I am able, on carrying out my decision. But as soon as work stops, friction stops. \r\n \r\nQ. How can one create useful friction? \r\n \r\nA. You must start with some concrete idea. If you produce no resistance, everything happens. But if you have certain ideas, you can already resist identification and struggle with imagination, negative emotions and things like that. Try to find what really prevents you from being active in the work. It is necessary to be active in the work; one can get nothing by being passive. We forget the beginning, where and why we started, and most of the time we never think about aim, but only about small details. No details are of any use without aim. Self-remembering is of no use without remembering the aims of the work and your original fundamental aim. If these aims are not remembered emotionally, years may pass and one will remain in the same state. It is not enough to educate the mind; it is necessary to educate the will. We are never the same for two days in succession. On some days we shall be more successful, on others less. All we can do is to control what we can. We can never control more difficult things if we do not control the easy things. Every day and hour there are things that we could control and do not; so we cannot have new things to control. We are surrounded by neglected things. Chiefly, we do not control our thinking. We think in a vague way about what we want, but if we do not formulate what we want, nothing will happen. This is the first condition but there are many obstacles. Effort is our money. If we want something, we must pay with effort. According to the strength of effort and the time of effort—in the sense of whether it is the right time for effort or not—we obtain results. Effort needs knowledge, knowledge of the moments when effort is useful. It is necessary to learn by long practice how to produce and apply effort. The efforts we can make are efforts of self-observation and self remembering. When people ask about effort, they think about an effort of 'doing'. That would be lost effort or wrong effort, but effort of self-observation and self remembering is right effort because it can give right results. Self-remembering has an element of will in it. If it were just dreaming, 'I am, I am, I am', it would not be anything. You can invent many different ways of remembering yourselves, for self remembering is not an intellectual or abstract thing; it is moments of will. It is not thought; it is action. It means having increased control; otherwise of what use would it be? You can only control yourselves in moments of self-remembering. The mechanical control which is acquired by training and education—when one is taught how to behave in certain circumstances—is not real control.

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Energy created in the organism is kept in a certain big accumulator which is connected with two small accumulators placed near each centre. Supposing man begins to think and uses the energy of one of the small accumulators of the intellectual centre. The energy in the accumulator gets lower and lower, and when it is at its lowest he gets tired. Then he makes an effort, or has a short rest, or yawns, and becomes connected with the second small accumulator. It is very interesting that yawning is a special help provided by nature for passing from one accumulator to another. He goes on thinking and drawing energy from the second accumulator, is again tired, yawns, or lights a cigarette, and becomes connected again with the first small accumulator. But that accumulator may be only half filled and is quickly exhausted. He becomes connected once more with the second, which is only a quarter filled, and so it goes on until time may come when both accumulators are empty. If at that moment a man makes a special effort of the right kind he may become connected directly with the big accumulator. This is one explanation of miracles, for he will then have an enormous supply of energy. But this needs a very great effort—not an ordinary effort. If he exhausts the big accumulator he dies, but generally he falls asleep or becomes unconscious long before that, so there is no danger. In ordinary life this connection with the big accumulator sometimes happens in extraordinary circum stances, such as moments of extreme danger. This is why there is this system of small accumulators. If one could be easily connected with the big accumulator one might, for example, never stop being angry for a week, and then one would die. So generally one does not become connected with the big accumulator until one has control over negative emotions. Emotions are stronger than other functions, so if one were to get into a negative emotion and had unlimited energy it would be too dangerous

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We take the human machine as a three-storied factory. The three stories represent the head, the middle part of the body and the lower part of the body with the spinal cord. Food enters the top story and passes to the bottom story as Oxygen 768. In the body it meets with a certain Carbon 192 and, mixing with this Carbon, becomes Nitrogen 384. Nitrogen 384 meets with another Carbon, 96, and with the help of this Carbon changes from Oxygen 384 to Nitrogen 192. It is an ascending octave, so these stages represent the notes do, re, mi. After mi there is an interval and the octave cannot develop any further by itself. It is very interesting that up to this point and one step further we can follow its development with the help of ordinary physiological knowledge. When food enters the mouth it meets with several different sorts of saliva and is mixed with them in the process of mastication; then it passes into the stomach and is worked on by gastric juices, which break down sugars, proteins and fats. From there it goes into the intestines and meets with bile, pancreatic and intestinal juices, which transform it into the smallest elements. These go through the wall of the bowel into venous blood, which is taken to the liver, where it meets with other carbons which change it chemically, and so to the heart, which pumps the venous blood to the lungs. Here it is oxygenated by the entry of air and returned to the heart as arterial blood. In this diagram all the various matters present in the body which the food meets with up to mi are divided into two categories: Carbon 192 and Carbon 96. Venous blood is mi 192 and arterial blood is fa 96. At the point when mi 192 cannot develop any further, another kind of food enters—air. It enters as Oxygen 192, meets with a certain Carbon 48 and with its help is transformed into re 96, and this production of re 96 gives a shock to mi 192 of the food octave enabling it to pass to fa 96. Beyond this, physiological knowledge cannot go. Re 96 of the air octave meets a corresponding Carbon and produces mi 48; and with the help of the same Carbon fa 96 of the food octave transforms into sol 48. Sol 48 can develop further, but mi 48 cannot, so the development of the air octave stops at this point. Sol 48 of the food octave passes into la 24 and la 24 into si 12, and stops there. Impressions enter as do 48, but cannot develop any further, because at their place of entry there is no Carbon 12 to help them. Nature has not provided it, or rather has not provided enough to produce any considerable effect, so do 48 does not transform and the three octaves stop at that. Think about this diagram and connect it with what has been said earlier, that nature brings man to a certain state and then leaves him to develop himself. Nature gives man possibilities, but does not develop these possibilities. It enables him to live, provides air, for otherwise the first octave could not go on, but the rest he must do himself. The machine is so arranged that air enters at the right moment and in the right consistency and gives a mechanical shock. It is important to understand that the Food Diagram or the Diagram of Nutrition consists of three stages. The first stage that I have just described shows how things happen in ordinary normal man: the food octave goes on all the way from do 768 to si 12; there are three notes of the air octave and one note of the impressions octave. If we want to develop further, we must increase the production of higher matters, and in order to do that we must understand and know how to do it, not only theoretically but in actual fact, because it needs a long time to learn how to use this knowledge and to make the right efforts. If we know how to bring Carbon 12 to the right place and if we make the necessary effort, the development of the air and impressions octaves goes further. The second stage shows what happens when the right shock has been given. Do 48 of the impressions octave is transformed into re 24 and mi 12. The air octave receives a shock from the impressions octave and mi 48 transforms into fa 24, sol 12 and even a small quantity of la 6. You must understand that the air is saturated with higher hydrogens which, in certain cases, can be retained by the organism in the process of breathing. But the amount of higher hydrogens that we can get from the air is very small. This stage represents the work of the human machine with one mechanical and one conscious shock. The third stage shows what happens when a second conscious shock is given at the right place. The first conscious shock is necessary at do 48. The second conscious shock is needed where mi 12 of the impressions octave and si 12 of the food octave have stopped in their development and cannot go on any further by themselves. Although there are carbons in the organism which would help them to be transformed, they are far away and cannot be reached, so another effort is necessary. If we know its nature and can produce this second conscious shock, mi 12 will develop into fa 6 and si 12 into do 6. The effort must begin from mi 12, so we must understand what mi 12 is psychologically. We can call it our ordinary emotions, that is to say, all strong emotions that we may have. When our emotions reach a certain degree of intensity, there is mi 12 in them. But in our present state only our unpleasant emotions actually reach mi 12; our ordinary pleasant emotions usually remain 24. It is not that our intense unpleasant emotions actually are mi 12, but they are based on it and need it in order to be produced. So the beginning of this second effort and preparation for it is work on negative emotions. This is the general outline of the work of the human organism and of how this work can be improved. It is important to understand where conscious shocks are necessary, because if you understand this it will help you to understand many other difficulties in the Food Diagram. You must understand, too, that these three octaves are not of equal force. If you take the force of the food octave, you will see that it gives certain results, certain effects that can be measured. Although the matter taken from air plays a very important part, the air octave represents a very small quantity of hydrogens, whereas the impressions octave is very powerful and may have an enormous meaning in relation to self remembering, states of consciousness, emotions and so on. So we can say that the relationship of the three octaves is not equal, because one has more substance, another less substance. This is our inner alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into precious metals. But all this alchemy is inside us, not outside

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If we take the Ray of Creation, we must remember that the worlds are connected with one another and affect one another in accordance with the Law of Three. In other words, the first three worlds, taken together, produce the phenomenon which influences the following worlds, and so on. In the first three worlds the Absolute is the conductor of the active force. World 3 the conductor of the passive force, and World 6 the conductor of the neutralizing force. In other words, the Absolute is Carbon, World 3 is Oxygen and World 6 is Nitrogen. If we place the three forces in sequence, according to the order in which they unite, we will get the order 1, 2, 3; but the matters serving as conductors of these forces will, according to their density, stand in the order: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. So when the triad begins to form, they stand in the order 1, 3, 2. When matters stand in this order, phenomena are produced. But for subsequent creation, for the formation of the next triad, nitrogen must, as it were, return once more to the third place, to the order 1, 2, 3, and in this way become carbon of the next triad, for the second triad comes from the neutralizing force of the first triad becoming active. This change of place of matters in the triad is a kind of cosmic dance which produces action. Let us now try to see how forces emerging from the Absolute in order to manifest themselves in World 3 must first pass through World 6. An analogy shows us quite plainly the necessity of this direction of force. As I said, man's will can influence a fragment of tissue in certain parts of his body. But a tissue is composed of cells. In order to affect the tissue man's will must first influence the cells composing the given fragment of tissue. The tissue is a different world from cells, but at the same time tissues do not exist apart from cells for they are composed of cells. World 3 is a separate world from World 6, and at the same time it is composed of Worlds 6, that is of worlds similar to our Milky Way. So in order to influence a part of World 3 (All Worlds) the Absolute must first influence a certain number of Worlds (All Suns) of which World 3 is composed. Thus, in the passage of forces. Worlds 1, 3, 6 stand, at first, in the order 1, 3, 6, then in the order 1, 6, 3, and then, for a further passage of forces, they must again resume the order 1, 3, 6. In the next triad the Milky Way is carbon, the sun oxygen and the planets nitrogen. Since nitrogen stands between carbon and oxygen, the force coming from the Milky Way, that is, from the stars, must first pass through the planets in order to reach the sun. This may look strange at the first glance, but if we visualize the structure of the solar system, we shall see quite clearly that it cannot be otherwise. No analogies are needed here. Imagine the sun surrounded by planets moving round it; in the distance, some group of stars from which influences go forth towards the sun. But the sun does not stand in one place; we know that it moves; the planets, rotating round it, move with it in space, forming, each of them by its motion, a spiral round the central rod of the sun, so that this central rod is entirely enclosed in the spirals of planets and no influence can reach it without first passing through the world of planets, that is, penetrating through the rings of the spirals. Further, planets becoming carbon of the third triad must find corresponding oxygen and nitrogen. In our Ray of Creation, oxygen is earth. But there is no nitrogen in the astronomical Ray of Creation. Therefore the planets cannot pass their influence direct to earth, and in order to make the passage of forces possible between the planets and the earth, a special contrivance was created which represents the sensitive organ of the earth—organic life on earth. Organic life on earth is nitrogen of the third triad. Forces coming from the planets fall first on organic life, which receives them and passes them on to the earth. If we remember the extremely complicated organization of the ends of sensitive nerves in our own organism, for instance the ends of the nerves of taste and smell, we shall not think it strange that man is defined as a sensitive nerve-end of the earth. Of course, a meadow covered with grass diners in many ways from man—it receives only some planetary influences, and very few of these. Man receives much more complex influences. But people differ greatly from one another in this respect. The majority of men are important only in the mass, and only the mass receives one or another influence. Others are capable of receiving influences individually— influences which masses cannot receive, for they are sensitive only to coarse influences. Organic life on earth, playing the role of nitrogen of the third triad, is by this very fact carbon of the fourth triad in the Ray. In other words, it conducts the active force which meets with corresponding oxygen and nitrogen. Earth is oxygen and moon is nitrogen through which the influences of organic life pass to earth. Now, if we take the Ray of Creation divided into four triads and bear in mind that the sum total of each triad is a definite hydrogen, we shall get four hydrogens or four definite densities of matter. These four hydrogens can be taken as corresponding to the four fundamental points of the universe. The first corresponds to the Absolute, the second to the sun, the third to the earth and the fourth to the moon. I said that the Ray of Creation can be taken as an octave. After re, represented by the moon, the octave has its do, which is also the Absolute. So there are, as it were, two Absolutes: one begins the Ray, the other ends it. One Absolute is All, the other is Nothing. But there can be no two Absolutes, for, by its very nature, the Absolute is one. Therefore All includes Nothing and Nothing includes All. Our dualistically constructed mind cannot take in the identity of opposites. We divide everything, even the Absolute. In reality, what we call the antithesis of opposites exists only in our conception, in our subjective perception of the world. But, even when we understand this, we are unable to express this understanding in words; our language has no words which can include simultaneously thesis and antithesis. Our mind cannot grasp them as one idea, just as it cannot grasp the images of some Hindu gods, combining complete opposites in themselves. Now we shall examine the passage of radiations between the four fundamental points of the cosmic octave. We take radiations between each two points in the form of an octave and thus obtain three octaves; Absolute—Sun; Sun—Earth; Earth—Moon. It should be noted that, although there are six intervals, only three of them require to be filled from without. The intervals between do and si are filled by the Will of the Absolute, by the influence of the sun's mass on the radiations passing through it, and by the influence of the mass of the earth on the radiations passing through it. All the hydrogens in this Table represent matters with which we have to do in studying man. It has been scaled down twice in order to include only the hydrogens that have relation to man, both to his outer life and the inner life of his organism.

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Q. Is blaming other people a feature? A. It may be a feature. But what is it based on? On lack of understanding. If you begin to study psychology, you find that all causes are in yourself; there can be no causes outside yourself. You do not remind yourself of this often enough. One little part understands that causes are in you, but the larger part continues to accuse other people. At the bottom of every favourite negative emotion you will find self-justification which feeds it. You must stop it in your mind first, and then after some time you will be able to stop it in the emotion too. Lack of understanding is the first cause, lack of effort the second

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Q. What is the origin of these artificial groups of 'I's? A. They may be formed by imitation, desire to be original, to be attractive, to be admired by people and so on. Q. When you find a group of 'I's which do not want to self-remember, what do you do about it? A. Leave it alone. If it does not want to, what can you do with it? If there are groups of 'I's that want to, work on them. Those 'I's which realize the necessity to self-remember must work with other 'I's that also want to. They must not spend their time in persuading other 'I's. Q. Is it to be expected that some 'I's in a man would be frightened of the idea of separating 'I' from 'Mr. A'? A. Certainly all 'I's which constitute false personality will be frightened, because it is death to them. But you must understand that they may show their fear only for some time and, after that, they may disguise themselves in order not to die. You may seriously think that you have finished with false personality, whereas it is only concealing itself inside some feature, ready to appear. This feature is always weakness. So long as it remains it takes all energy, but it may be very well disguised, and in that form it may even become stronger, growing parallel with the growth of real 'I'. So the realization of the necessity of this division into 'I' and 'Mr. A' is not sufficient to destroy it. You must remember that false personality defends itself.

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You must understand that you cannot even begin to work on the level you are; you have to change certain things first. You can find what to change only as a result of your observations. Sometimes it becomes very clear, and only then does the fight begin, because false personality begins to defend itself. You must know false personality first. All that we speak about now, refers to the first stage—understanding that we do not know false personality, that in order to know it we must study, that all the work we do is done at the expense of false personality, that all the work we can do on ourselves means diminishing the power of false personality, and that if we begin to try and work, leaving false personality without disturbing it, all the work will come to nothing. I repeat again—you must understand that false personality is a combination of all lies, features and 'I's that can never be useful in any sense, either in life or in the work—just like negative emotions. Yet false personality always says 'I' and always ascribes to itself many capacities, such as will, self-consciousness and so on, and if it is not checked it remains an obstacle to all the work. So one of the first and most important factors, in trying to change oneself, is this division of oneself into 'I' and whatever your name may be. If this division is not made, if one forgets it and continues to think of oneself in the usual way, or if one divides oneself in a wrong way, work stops. Work on oneself can only progress on the basis of this division, but it must be the right division. It often happens that people make a wrong division: what they like in themselves they call 'I' and what they dislike, or what in their opinion is weak or unimportant, they call false personality. This is quite a wrong division; it changes nothing and one remains as one was. This wrong division is simply lying, lying to oneself, which is worse than anything, because the moment one meets with the smallest difficulty it will show itself by inner arguing and wrong understanding. If one uses a wrong division, it will not be reliable and will fail one in a moment of need. To make a right division of oneself one must understand what is 'I' and what is 'Ouspensky', 'Brown' or 'Jones', in other words, what is lying and what is oneself. As I said, even if you admit this possibility of dividing yourself, you are bound to call what you like in yourself 'I' and what you dislike 'Not I', for the right division cannot be found at once; you must find some indications in connection with the work which will help. For instance, if you say that your aim is to be free, it is first of all necessary to understand that you are not free. If you understand to what extent you are not free and if you formulate your desire to be free, you will then see in yourself which part of you wants to be free and which part does not. This would be a beginning

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But first of all, as I said before, it is necessary to understand what self-remembering is, why it is better to self-remember, what effect it will produce, and so on. It needs thinking about. Besides, in trying to selfremember it is necessary to keep the connection with all the other ideas of the system. If one takes one thing and omits another thing—for instance, if one seriously works on self-remembering without knowing about the idea of the division of 'I's, so that one takes oneself as one (as a unity) from the beginning—then self-remembering will give wrong results and may even make development impossible. There are schools, for instance, or systems which, although they do not formulate it in this way, are actually based on false personality and on struggle against conscience. Such work must certainly produce wrong results. At first it will create a certain kind of strength, but it will make the development of higher consciousness an impossibility. False personality either destroys or distorts memory. Self-remembering is a thing that must be based on right function. At the same time as working on it you must work on the weakening of false personality. Several lines of work are suggested and explained from the beginning, and all must go together. You cannot just do one thing and not another. All are necessary for creating this right combination, but first must come the understanding of the struggle with false personality. Suppose one tries to remember oneself and does not wish to make efforts against false personality. Then all its features will come into play, saying, 'I dislike these people', 'I do not want this', 'I do not want that', and so on. Then it will not be work but quite the opposite. As I said, if one tries to work in this wrong way it may make one stronger than one was before, but in such a case the stronger one becomes, the less is the possibility of development. Fixing before development—that is the danger

166

Q. How can one recognize truth on our level? A. By coming to simple things. In simple things one can recognize truth; one can recognize what is a door and what is a wall, and one can bring every difficult question to the same thing. It means that you have to recognize a certain quality in quite simple principles and verify other things by these simple principles. This is why philosophy—just discussion of possibilities or the meaning of words—is excluded from this system. You must try to understand simple things, and you must learn to think in this way; then you will be able to bring everything to simple things. Take for instance self-remembering. You are given all the material; if you observe yourself, you will see that you did not remember yourself at that moment; you will notice that at some moments you remember yourself more and at some moments less, and you will decide that it is better to remember yourself. This means that you have found a door, that you see the difference between a door and a wall.

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All our life, all our habitual ways of thinking, have only one aim—to avoid shocks, unpleasant feelings, unpleasant realizations about ourselves. And this is the chief thing that keeps us asleep, because in order to awake we must not be afraid; we must be brave enough to see the contradictions. Even quite apart from the question of conscience, it is important to find in yourself that, when you have strong emotions (it does not refer to small emotions), when you feel strongly about some particular thing, you may be practically certain that at another moment you will have a different emotion about the same thing. If you cannot see it in yourself, see it in other people. When you realize the existence of these contradictory emotions, it will help you to understand your mechanicalness and your lack of understanding of yourself—lack of self-knowledge. So long as we feel different emotions at different times, what are we like? One moment we trust, another moment we are suspicious; one moment we like, another moment we dislike. So the aim is to bring those different emotions together, otherwise we will never know ourselves. If we always feel only one emotion at a time and do not remember other emotions, we are identified with it. When we have another emotion we forget the first; when we have a third, we forget the first and the second. Very early in life, by imitation and in different other ways, we learn to live in a kind of imaginary state to save ourselves from unpleasantness, so people develop in themselves this capacity to see only one emotion at a time. Remember to work. Remember yourself in one mood, then remember yourself in another mood. Try to connect them together and you will see

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Q. I had a problem which was worrying me. I tried to self-remember and for a short time I got into a state in which it was no longer possible to worry, and at the same time my sense of values generally changed. This state did not last long, but the problem, when it returned as one, did not again assume the importance it had before. I find it very difficult to recapture this state. A. Quite right. Continue to observe and you will find that there is a place in you where you are quiet, calm, and nothing can disturb you—only it is difficult to find the way there. But if you do it several times you will be able to remember some of the steps, and by the same steps you may come there again. Only you cannot do it after one experience, for you will not remember the way. This quiet place is not a metaphor—it is a very real thing

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Q. Could you, please, say again which is internal and which external considering? A. External considering is a form of self-remembering in relation to people. You take other people into consideration and do, not what is pleasant to you, but what is pleasant to them. It means you must sacrifice yourself, but it does not mean self sacrifice. It means that in relation to people you must not act without thinking. You must think first, and then act. Your thinking will show you that, more often than not, if this person would prefer you to act in one manner and not in another, it is all the same to you, so why not do what he likes? So the idea of sacrifice does not enter into it. But if it is not the same to you, it is quite a different question. What is better for you, what is better for them, who those people are, what you want from them, what you want to do for them—all this must enter into it. But the idea is that in relation to people things must not happen mechanically, without thinking. You must decide your course of action. It means you do not walk over people without seeing them. And internal considering means that you walk over them without noticing. We have too much internal and not enough external considering. External considering is very important for self-remembering. If we have not got enough of it, we cannot remember ourselves. Q. Is it the same as understanding people? A. No, you can understand people only as much as you understand yourself. It is understanding their difficulties, understanding what they want, watching the impression you produce on people and trying not to produce a wrong impression. Q. Would you say that kindness is external considering? A. What you knew in life is not external considering. It is necessary to understand the principle and create standards for oneself. With the help of external considering you control the impression you wish to produce. With internal considering you wish to produce one impression and produce a different one. Q. External considering seems to me very far away. A. It must be here to-day. If it remains far away, you remain far away yourself. Q. Does external considering involve the ability to play a conscious role? A. Yes, but there are different degrees. External considering is only the beginning; to play a conscious role means much more. Q. And what is internal considering? A. Feeling that people do not pay you enough; making accounts; always feeling cheated, underpaid. Q. I find it very difficult to stop inner considering. Is there any special technique to be employed against it? A. No, there is no special technique—only understanding and right points of view. Observe more. Perhaps you will find moments free from considering and see how to begin struggling with it and studying it. It is mechanical, a mechanical attitude, the same as identification. Q. Is self-justification always a manifestation of internal considering? A. It is connected with it, but it is another thing. Internal considering does not need any justification. One must have a reason for justifying, but if one is in internal considering, one always justifies it. Internal considering means identification; external considering means struggle with identification. Internal considering is mechanical; external considering means at least attention. So by practising non-identifying, by trying to control attention, you find many opportunities of studying external considering and, if you find examples, perhaps you will find methods of struggling with internal considering and transforming it into the practice of external considering. For instance, you are talking to somebody from whom you want to get something. Say he knows something and you want him to tell you what he knows. Then you must speak in the way he would like, not argue, not oppose him. External considering is always practical. Q. Does inner considering mean considering oneself too much? A. It always takes the form of inner bargaining, of thinking that other people do not consider you enough. It is very important to understand inner considering. There are so many subtle forms of it we do not notice, and yet our life is filled with it. Q. Is desire to be noticed considering? A. Both desire to be and not to be noticed is considering. There are many psychological states that ordinary psychology cannot explain or describe which depend on identifying and considering. Q. How is it best to think of inner considering? A. You must try in free moments to have a right mind about it. When you are considering, it is too late. You must think of typical cases of considering, of what produces it, and then have a right point of view about it, realize how useless and ridiculous it is. Then compare it with external considering, and try not to forget it. If you do this you may remember it when a moment of considering comes, and perhaps it will not come. What is really important is to think about considering when you are free from it, and not justify or hide it from yourself. Q. The more I try to work, the more I seem to consider internally. It seems the most difficult thing to deal with. A. Considering cannot grow if you work, it only becomes more visible. And that means that it diminishes, for it cannot be seen without it diminishing. The fact that you notice it proves that it has become less strong. This is a natural illusion, the same as when one feels that one does not understand whereas before one understood. This means that one begins to understand. The first doubt about one's understanding already means a certain understanding.

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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.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

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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

In Chicago, Simon Moon was listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted. (Two blocks north in space and over forty years back in time, Simon's mother heard pistol shots as she left Wobbly Hall-Simon was a second-generation anarchist-and followed the crowd to gather in front of the Biograph Theatre where a man lay bleeding to death in the alley. \r\n\r\nAnd the next morning-July 23, 1934-Billie Freschette, in her cell at Cook County Jail, got the news from a matron. In this White Man's Country, I am the lowliest of the lowly, subjugated because I am not white, and subjugated again because I am not male. I am the embodiment of all that is rejected and scorned-the female, the colored, the tribe, the earth-all that has no place in this world of white male technology. I am the tree that is cut down to make room for the factory that poisons the air. I am the river filled with sewage. I am the Body that the Mind despises. I am the lowliest of the lowly, the mud beneath your feet. And yet of all the world John Dillinger picked me to be his bride. He plunged within me, into the very depths of me. I was his bride, not as your Wise Men and Churches and Governments know marriage, but we were truly wed. As the tree is wed to the earth, the mountain to the sky, the sun to the moon. I held his head to my breast, and tousled his hair as if it were sweet as fresh grass, and I called him 'Johnnie.' He was more than a man. He was mad but not mad, not as a man may go mad when he leaves his tribe and lives among hostile strangers and is mistreated and scorned. He was not mad as all other white men are mad because they have never known a tribe. He was mad as a god might be mad. And now they tell me he is dead. 'Well,' the matron asked finally, 'aren't you going to say anything? Aren't you Indians human?' She had a real evil shine in her eye, like the eye of the rattlesnake. She wants to see me cry. She stands there and waits, watching me through the bars. 'Don't you have any feelings at all? Are you some kind of animal?' I say nothing. I keep my face immobile. No white shall ever see the tears of a Menominee. At the Biograph Theatre, Molly Moon turns away in disgust as souvenir hunters dip their handkerchiefs in the blood. \r\n\r\nI turn away from the matron and look up, out the barred window, to the stars, and the spaces between them seem bigger than ever. Bigger and emptier. Inside me there is a space like that now, big and empty, and it will never be filled again. When the tree is torn out by its roots, the earth must feel that way. The earth must scream silently, as I screamed silently.) But she understood the sacramental meaning of the handkerchiefs dipped in blood; as Simon understands it. Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all. Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon's Captain Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it's important for them to vote. 'My parents don't vote,' I say. 'Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should,' she tells me with the real authentic Doris Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It's early in the term and she hasn't heard about me from the last-semester teacher. 'I really don't think so,' I say politely. 'They don't think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street.' It's like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every boy in the room (we're all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up and slide down again. I mean, they're all praying (except me, I'm an atheist, of course) that they won't get called on to stand up; if it wouldn't attract attention, they'd be clubbing their dicks down with their geography books. 'That's the wonderful thing about this country,' she finally gets out, 'even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail.' \r\n\r\n'You must be nuts,' I say. 'My dad's been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a special revolving door just for him: My mom, too. You oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this town and see what happens.' Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity Bookstore and you'll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable. So naturally I start hanging out on Wall Street and smoking dope and pretty soon I'm the youngest living member of what they called the Beat Generation. Which does not improve my relations with school authorities, but at least it's a relief from all that patriotism and anarchism. By the time I'm seventeen and they shot Kennedy and the country starts coming apart at the seams, we're not beatniks anymore, we're hippies, and the thing to do is go to Mississippi. Did you ever go to Mississippi? You know what Dr. Johnson said about Scotland-'The best thing you can say for it is that God created it for some purpose, but the same is true of Hell.' Blot Mississippi; it's not part of this story anyway. The next stop was Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs where I majored in mathematics for reasons you will soon guess. The pot there grows wild in acres and acres of beautiful nature preserve kept up by the college. You can go out there at night, pick your own grass for the week from the female of the hemp species and sleep under the stars with a female of your own species, then wake up in the morning with birds and rabbits and the whole lost Thomas Wolfe America scene, a stone, a leaf, and unfound door and all of it, then make it to class really feeling good and ready for an education. Once I woke up with a spider running across my face, and I thought, 'So a spider is running across my face,' and brushed him off gently, 'it's his world, too.' In the city, I would have killed him. What I mean is Antioch is a stone groove but that life is no preparation for coming back to Chicago and Chemical Warfare. Not that I ever got maced before '68, but I could read the signs; don't let anybody tell you it's pollution, brothers and sisters. It's Chemical Warfare. They'll kill us all to make a buck. I got stoned one night and went home to see what it would be like relating to Mom and Dad in that condition. It was the same but different. Tolstoy coming out of her mouth, Bakunin out of his. And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Goddard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked. 'You're both wrong,' I said. 'Freedom won't come through Love, and it won't come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.' I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows of Maya. Dad was the first to recover. 'Imagination,' he said, his big red face crinkling in that grin that always drove the cops crazy when they were arresting him. 'That's what comes of sending good working-class boys to rich people's colleges. Words and books get all mixed up with reality in their heads. When you were in that jail in Mississippi you imagined yourself through the walls, didn't you? How many times an hour did you imagine yourself through the walls? I can guess. The first time I was arrested, during the GE strike of thirty-three, I walked through those walls a million times. But every time I opened my eyes, the walls and the bars were still there. What got me out finally? What got you out of Biloxi finally? Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it.' That's what I remember best about him, that one speech, and the strange clear blue of his eyes. He died that year, and I found out that there was more to the Imagination than I had known, for he didn't die at all. He's still around, in the back of my skull somewhere, arguing with me, and that's the truth. It's also the truth that he's dead, really dead, and part of me was buried with him. It's uncool to love your father these days, so I didn't even know that I loved him until they closed the coffin and I heard myself sobbing, and it comes back again, that same emptiness, whenever I hear 'Joe Hill': 'The copper bosses lulled you, Joe.' 'I never died,' said he. Both lines are true, and mourning never ends. They didn't shoot Dad the clean way, like Joe Hill, but they ground him down, year after year, burning out his Wob fires (and he was Aries, a real fire sign) with their cops, their courts, their jails, and their taxes, their corporations, their cages for the spirit and cemeteries for the soul, their plastic liberalism and murderous Marxism, and even as I say that I have to pay a debt to Lenin for he gave me the words to express how I felt when Dad was gone. 'Revolutionaries,' he said, 'are dead men on furlough.' \r\n\r\nThe Democratic Convention of '68 was coming and I knew that my own furlough might be much shorter than Dad's because I was ready to fight them in the streets. All spring Mom was busy at the Women for Peace center and I was busy conspiring with surrealists and Yippies. Then I met Mao Tsu-hsi. It was April 30, Walpurgasnacht (pause for thunder on the soundtrack), and I was rapping with some of the crowd at the Friendly Stranger. H.P. Lovecraft (the rock group, not the writer) was conducting services in the back room, pounding away at the door to Acid Land in the gallant effort, new and striking that year, to break in on waves of sound without any chemical skeleton key at all and I am in no position to evaluate their success objectively since I was, as is often the case with me, 99 and 44/100ths percent stoned out of my gourd before they began operations. I kept catching this uniquely pensive Oriental face at the next table, but my own gang, including the weird faggot-priest we nicknamed Padre Pederastia, had most of my attention. I was laying it on them heavy. It was my Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade period. 'The head-trip anarchists are as constipated as the Marxists,' I was giving forth; you recognize the style by now. 'Who speaks for the thalamus, the glands, the cells of the organism? Who sees the organism? We cover it with clothes to hide its apehood. We won't have liberated ourselves from servitude until people throw all their clothes in the closet in spring and don't take them out again winter. We won't be human beings, the way apes are apes and dogs are dogs, until we fuck where and when we want to, like any other mammal. Fucking in the streets isn't just a tactic to blow minds; it's recapturing our own bodies. Anything less and we're still robots possessing the wisdom of the straight line but not the understanding of the organic curve.' And so on. And so forth. I think I found a few good arguments for rape and murder while I was at it. \r\n\r\n'The next step beyond anarchy,' somebody said cynically. 'Real chaos.' \r\n\r\n'Why not?' I demanded. 'Who works at a straight job here?' None of them did, of course; I deal dope myself. 'Will you work at a straight job for something that calls itself an anarchist syndicate? Will you run an engine lathe eight unfucking hours a day because the syndicate tells you the people need what the lathe produces? If you will, the people just becomes a new tyrant.' \r\n\r\n'To hell with machines,' Kevin McCool, the poet, said enthusiastically. 'Back to the caves!' He was as stoned as me. The Oriental face leaned over: she was wearing a strange headband with a golden apple inside a pentagon. Her black eyes somehow reminded me of my father's blue eyes. 'What you want is an organization of the imagination?' she asked politely. I flipped. It was too much, hearing those words just then. 'A man at the Vedanta Society told me that John Dillinger walked through the walls when he made his escape from Crown Point Jail,' Miss Mao went on in a level tone. 'Do you think that is possible?' You know how dark coffee houses are. The Friendly Stranger was murkier than most. I had to get out. Blake talked to the Archangel Gabriel every morning at breakfast, but I wasn't that heavy yet. 'Hey, where you going, Simon?' somebody called. Miss Mao didn't say anything, and I didn't look back at that polite and pensive face-it would have been much easier if she looked sinister and inscrutable. But when I hit Lincoln and started toward Fullerton, I heard steps behind me. I turned and Padre Pederastia touched my arm gently. 'I asked her to come and listen to you,' he said. 'She was to give a signal if she thought you were ready. The signal was more dramatic than I expected, it seems. A conversation out of your past that had some heavy emotional meaning to you?' \r\n\r\n'She's a medium?' I asked numbly. \r\n\r\n'You can name it that.' I looked at him in the light from the Biograph marquee and I remembered Mom's story about the people dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood and I heard the old hymn start in my head ARE YOU WASHED are you washed ARE you WASHED in the BLOOD of the Lamb and I remembered how we all thought he hung out with us freaks in the hope of leading us back to the church holy Roman Catholic and apostolic as Dad called it when he was drunk and bitter. It was obvious that whatever the Padre was recruiting for had little to do with that particular theological trade union. 'What is this?' I asked. 'And who is that woman?' \r\n\r\n'She's the daughter of Fu Manchu,' he said. Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed like a rooster crowing. Just as suddenly, he stopped and looked at me. Just looked at me. 'Somehow,' I said slowly, 'I've qualified for a small demonstration of whatever you and she are selling. But I don't qualify for any more until I make the right move?' He gave the faintest hint of a nod and went on watching me. Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books I'd gobbled and guilty-unsure about my imaginative flights away from my father's realism and of course stoned of course but I finally understood why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen, there was nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would satisfy him and I had to do exactly that which I could not not do, namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon Moon or, more precisely SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be a matter of wandering through room after room of my brain looking for the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead, it was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the Padre was still watching me. 'Nobody home,' I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough. \r\n\r\n'That's odd,' he said. 'Who's conducting the search?' And I walked through the walls and into the Fire. Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky happened last night.

Living Buddha, Living Christ

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh

Publisher: Riverhead Trade (2007)

The Bhagavad Gita

Author: Anonymous

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2008)

The proverbial benevolent uncle turns up in a village and finds his nephews and nieces and their friends playing in a hut with toys and make-do twig-and-rag dolls. 'Why play with these?' he asks. 'Outside is the kalpa-taru, the Wish-Fulfilling Tree. Stand under it, and wish. It will give you anything you want.'\n\n The children don't believe him. They know the world's not structured to give you whatever you want. You have to struggle very hard for the smallest reward - and, of course, others always seem to get the plums, for they have what is known as 'connections.'\n\n They smile knowingly. The uncle leaves. \n\n No sooner has he left, however, than they rush to the Tree, and start wishing. They want sweets - and they get stomachache. They want toys - and they get boredom. Bigger and better toys - bigger and better boredom. \n\n This worries them. Something must be wrong somewhere. Someone is tricking them. What is this unpleasant unsuspected unwanted extra that tags along with the sweets and the toys? \n\n What they have not realized yet is that the Wish-Fulfilling Tree is the enormously generous but totally unsentimental cosmos. It will give you exactly what you want - 'this world is your wish-fulfilling cow,' says Krishna - and with it its built-in opposite. The tragedy of the world is not that we don't get what we want, but that we always get exactly what we want, along with its built-in opposite. Wish it, think it, dream it, do it - you've got it! - and literally, you've had it. That's it - having and being had.\n\n So the children grow up and become, euphemistically, 'young adults.' They really are just a bunch of over-grown kids, all trapped under the Wishing Tree. Instead of sweets and toys - childish trifles! - they now crave Sex, Fame, Money, and Power, the four sweet fruits that hang from the tree. Bittersweet fruits. There are, truly speaking, no other fruits. There is nothing else to be had.\n\n They reach out and bite each of these four fruits and get the same bitter after-taste of disappointment and disillusionment. But they go on wishing, because there seems to be little else that one can do under the Wishing Tree. Creatures come and go; the Tree is always there.\n\n Then they grow old, and are stretched out under the tree, lying on their death cots. Pathetic old men and women, kindly referred to as 'garu-jana', 'respected elders.' They lie huddled in three security-seeking groups. The first group whispers, 'It's all a hoax. The world's a farce.' Fools, they have learnt nothing.\n\n The second huddle whispers, 'We made the wrong wishes. We'll wish again. This time we'll make the right wish.' Bigger fools; they have learnt less than nothing.\n\n The third group is the most foolish. 'What's the point living? Nothing makes sense. We want to die.'\n\n The obliging tree quickly grants their last desire. They die - and they get the built-in opposite of the death-wish - they are reborn - and under the same tree, for where else can one be born or re-born but within the cosmos!\n\n There was also a young crippled boy who hobbled to the tree, but was shoved aside by his more agile friends. So he crawled back to the hut and gazed at the marvelous tree from the window, waiting for a chance for him to go and make the wish that lame boys make. What he saw from the window awed and almost unnerved him. \n\n He saw his companions wanting sweets and getting stomachache, grabbing toys and getting bored. He saw them scrambling for Sex, Fame, Money, and Power, and getting their opposites, and agonizing - and not realizing the cause of their anguish. He saw them divided into three groups - the Cynics, the self-appointed Wise Men, and the hope-bereft Death-wishers. He saw this clearly, with the poignant brilliant sharpness of naked truth.\n\n The spectacle of this cosmic swindle so impressed him that he stood stunned in brief, lucid bafflement. A divine comedy, a divine tragicomedy, the panoramic cycle of karma, was being enacted in front of his eyes. A gush of compassion welled in his heart for the victims of karma, and in that gush of compassion the lame boy forgot to wish. He had sliced the cosmic fig-tree with non-attachment.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Author: Thomas L. Friedman

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (2008)

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organization.\n\n We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference:\n Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come five thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.\n\n Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.\n\n I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.\n\n I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to not be heard.\n\n I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.\n\n I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day -- vanishing forever.\n\n In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.\n\n Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?\n\n All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!\n \n You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.\n You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.\n You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.\n And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.\n \n If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!\n\n Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.\n\n I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil -- borders and governments will never change that.\n\n I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.\n\n In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.\n\n In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.\n\n In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter -- we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.\n\n Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: 'I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection.'\n\n If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?\n\n I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.\n\n I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!\n\n At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:\n \n not to fight with others,\n to work things out,\n to respect others,\n to clean up our mess,\n not to hurt other creatures\n to share - not be greedy.\n \n Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?\n\n Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for -- we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying 'everyting's going to be alright' , 'we're doing the best we can' and 'it's not the end of the world'.\n\n But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says 'You are what you do, not what you say.'\n\n Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening

Suffering, Suicide and Immortality

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

Publisher: Dover Publications (2006)

This Is It

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

Lost in the Cosmos

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.

Man's Search for Meaning

Author: Viktor Frankl

Publisher: Pocket Books (1997)

Meditations

Author: Marcus Aurelius

Publisher: Penguin Great Ideas (2005)

Neither want of power nor want of skill could have led Nature into the error of allowing good and evil to be visited indiscriminately on the virtuous and the sinful alike. Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.'

To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming - in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the Ruler within you - means a loss of opportunity for some other task. See then that the flow of your thoughts is kept free from idle or random fancies, particularly those of an inquisitive or uncharitable nature. \r\n\r\nA man should habituate himself to such a way of thinking that if suddenly asked, 'What is in your mind at this minute?' he could respond frankly and without hesitation; thus proving that all his thoughts were simple and kindly, as becomes a social being with no taste for the pleasures of sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments that he would blush to acknowledge in himself. \r\n\r\nSuch a man, determined here and now to aspire to the heights, is indeed a priest and minister of the gods; for he is making full use of that indwelling power which can keep a man unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil. He is a competitor in the greatest of all contests, the struggle against passion's mastery; he is imbued through and through with uprightness, welcoming whole-heartedly whatever falls to his lot and rarely asking himself what others may be saying or doing or thinking except when the public interest requires it. \r\n\r\nHe confines his operations to his own concerns, having his attention fixed on his own particular thread of the universal web; seeing to it that his actions are honourable, and convinced that what befalls him must be for the best - for his own directing fate is itself under a higher direction. \r\n\r\nHe does not forget the brotherhood of all rational beings, nor that a concern for every man is proper to humanity; and he knows that it is not the world's opinions he should follow, but only those of men whose lives confessedly accord with Nature. As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad, and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes, has no value for him.

Again, it is a sin to pursue pleasure as a good and to avoid pain as an evil. It is bound to result in complaints that Nature is unfair in her rewarding of vice and virtue; since it is the bad who are so often in enjoyment of pleasures and the means to obtain them, while pains and events that occasion pains descend upon the heads of the good. Besides, if a man is afraid of pain, he is afraid of something happening which will be part of the appointed order of things, and this is itself a sin; if he is bent on the pursuit of pleasure, he will not stop at acts of injustice, which again is manifestly sinful. No; when Nature herself makes no distinction - and if she did, she would not have brought pains and pleasures into existence side by side - it behooves those who would follow in her footsteps to be like-minded and exhibit the same indifference. He therefore who does not view with equal unconcern pain or pleasure, death or life, fame or dishonour - all of them employed by Nature without any partiality - clearly commits a sin.

It is we - we, intelligent beings - who alone have forgotten this mutual zeal for unity; among us alone the currents are not seen to converge. Nevertheless, though man may flee as he will, he is still caught and held fast; Nature is too strong for him. Observe with care, and you will see: you will sooner find a fragment of earth unrelated to the rest of earth than a man who is utterly without some link with his fellows.'

Thus, with every man, imagine his counterpart; and then go on to the reflection, 'Where are they all now?' Nowhere - or anywhere. In this way , you will grow accustomed to looking on all that is mortal as vapour and nothingness; and the more so, if you will also remember that things once changed are for ever past recall. Then why struggle and strain, instead of being content to live out your little span in seemly fashion? Think what materials and possibilities for good you are rejecting; since what are all your tribulations but exercises for the training of your reason, once it has learnt to see the truths of life in a proper philosophic light? Be patient, then, until you have made them familiar and natural to yourself, in the same way as a strong stomach can assimilate every kind of diet, or a bright fire turn anything that is cast upon it into heat and flame.

The man whose heart is palpitating for fame after death does not reflect that out of all those who remember him every one will himself soon be dead also, and in course of time the next generation after that, until in the end, after flaring and sinking by turns, the final spark of memory is quenched. Furthermore, even supposing that those who remember you were never to die at all, nor their memories to die either, yet what is that to you? Clearly, in your grave, nothing; and even in your lifetime, what is the good of praise - unless maybe to subserve some lesser design? Surely, then, you are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.

Whatever befalls, Nature has either prepared you to face it or she has not. If something untoward happens which is within your powers of endurance, do not resent it, but bear it as she has enabled you to do. Should it exceed those powers, still do not give way to resentment; for its victory over you will put an end to its own existence. Remember, however, that in fact Nature has given you the ability to bear anything which your own judgement succeeds in declaring bearable and endurable by regarding it as a point of self-interest and duty to do so.

Everything - a horse, a vine - is created for some duty. This is nothing to wonder at: even the sun-god himself will tell you, 'There is a work that I am here to do,' and so will all the other sky-dwellers. For what task, then, were you yourself created? For pleasure? Can such a thought be tolerated?

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

If the inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities offered by circumstance. It asks for no predeterminate material; in the pursuance of its aim it is willing to compromise; hindrances to its progress are merely converted into matter for its own use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, which would have quenched a feeble glow; but it's fiery blaze quickly assimilates the load, consumes it, and flames the higher for it.

The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)

Each now strives to isolate his person as much as possible from the others, wishing to experience within himself life's completeness, yet from all his efforts there results not life's completeness but a complete suicide, for instead of discovering the true nature of their being they lapse into total solitariness. For in our era all are isolated into individuals, each retires solitary within his burrow, each withdraws from the other, conceals himself and that which he possesses and ends by being rejected of men and by rejecting them. He amasses wealth in solitariness, thinking: how strong I am now and how secure, yet he does not know, the witless one, that the more he amasses, the further he will sink into suicidal impotence. For he has become accustomed to relying upon himself alone and has isolated himself from the whole as an individual, has trained his soul not to trust in help from others, in human beings and mankind, and is fearful only of losing his money and privileges he has acquired. In every place today the human mind is mockingly starting to lose its awareness of the fact that a person's true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of human kind.

The world has proclaimed freedom, particularly of late, and yet what do we see in this freedom of theirs: nothing but servitude and suicide! For the world says: 'You have needs, so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the wealthiest and most hihgly placed of men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even multiply them' - that is the present-day teaching of the world. In that, too, they see freedom. And what is the result of this right to the multiplication of needs? Among the rich solitariness and spiritual suicide, and among the poor - envy and murder, for while they have been given rights, they have not yet been afforded the means with which to satisfy their needs. Assurance is offered that as time goes by the world will become more united, that it will form itself into a brotherly communion by shortening distance and transmitting thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a unification of men. In construing freedom as the multiplication and speedy satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they engender within themselves many senseless and stupid desires, habits and most absurd inventions. They live solely for envy, for love of the flesh and for self-conceit. To have dinners, horses and carriages, rank, and attendants who are slaves is already such a necessity that they will even sacrifice their lives, their honour and philanthropy in order to satisfy that necessity, and will even kill themselves if they cannot do so. Among those who are not rich we see the same thing, and among the poor envy and the frustration of needs are at present dulled by drunkenness. But soon in place of alcohol it will be blood upon which they grow intoxicated - to that they are being led. I ask you: is such a man free? ...How can he desist from his habits, this slave, where can he go, if he is so accustomed to satisfying his countless needs, which he himself has invented? Solitary is he, and what concern can he have for the whole? And they have reached a point where the quantity of objects they amass is ever greater, and their joy is ever smaller.

It is better to be led by the nose on occasion than to find oneself quite without a nose at all, as a certain ailing marquis pronounced quite recently during confession to his holy Jesuit father. I was there, it was simply charming. 'Return to me my nose!' he said. 'My son,' the pater prevaricated, 'all is accomplished according to the unknowable destinies of Providence and an apparent disaster sometimes brings in its wake an exceptional, though invisible advantage. If stern fortune has deprived you of your nose, then your advantage is that all the rest of your life no one will ever dare to tell you that you have been led by the nose.' 'Holy father, that is no consolation!' the despairing marquis exclaimed, 'on the contrary, I would be only too delighted to be led by the nose every day for the rest of my life, if only it were in its proper place!' 'My son,' the pater sighed, 'it is wrong to demand all blessings at once, and this is already a complaint against Providence, which even now has not forgotten you; for if you cry, as you cried just now, that you would be ready to be led by the nose all the rest of your life, then even now your desire has been fulfilled, though obliquely: for, having lost your nose, you are by that very fact being led by it...