If one had an ultimate experience, everything necessary to that outcome would ‘reach up’ to the value of our memory of it. But in thus looking back, we uncover the conditions that brought it about, and in thus revaluing them, one clutches them as stimuli, for the first time, now dissipating or redirecting one’s cognitive force by having shoved the peripheral into the central. The same conditions, after analysis, are never quite the same cognitive experience. It may be one step down from the ultimate sensation, but clarity now looks down on it and would have it no other way.
A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387
387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood. To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process . In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism