the exposure of my own machinery, The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 250

250

If reality has value and unreality, no value, then I have the equation, “1 or 0?”  But a value only exists if a human machine has already foisted it onto reality.  Valuing is strictly a human event.  When I have the courage to affirm this human projector, reality is truth, and I find a value of one conveniently projected, while unreality is error and consequently set at a value of zero.  
The human casts a projection: consciousness.  As far as I believe consciousness to be independent of my machinery, it is an illusion, a zero.  As far as I understand its relation to my machinery, it is a part of my own reality ... a contribution to my value of one.

A very different equation exists if I fear the exposure of my own machinery.  Now the projection.... the illusion is preferred to reality.  The man of faith stands with arms folded in front of the chalkboard of mechanical description and will not let the intellect so much as look upon it, let alone ask a question.

There is an immediate problem of course.  Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of the human machine ... of substantial material, the religious man is offended and humiliated to the same degree that he gains experience.  There is only one way for humiliation and fear to overthrow the mechanical view: he must invert the standard.  The greater value must be placed upon precisely the absence of matter.  Religious pride must resolve itself into a value of Zero-material, and the conveyer of “mere” reality must by default become the Negative One.  Now the religious standard holds the absence of reality to be the ultimate Truth.  With the unexplained, the priest irreverently stuffs God into a gap of ignorance that he calls, Mystery and Wonder.  God eludes all affirmative definition.  He is immaterial and infinite.  Truth is ineffable.  

This is the standard forced upon me.  And I am damned to a Hell where my society presents me with this choice of being either a zero or a negative one, of submitting to the unreal or being a sort of spiritual terrorist who declares that the religious equation, however complex it is made out to be, having a multiple of zero, will always resolve itself into a zero.  


Ironically, the religious attempt becomes a greater intellectual challenge than the affirmation of reality.  So little effort is required to resolve the religious equation as zero that its simplicity must be seen as our “laziness” – and to be “virtuous” now is to overcome simplicity with industry and excessive formality.  Morality is now “not that simple” and it is we who are simpleminded.  But as this standard is forced upon us, it slaps us ... keeps us awake ... it stings and poisons us, but to the point that even the very depths of resentment remind us of this reality and in accepting even this, we have the original standard again, where the real is valued over the illusion.  Even this!  My own reality ... my very existence, a One.

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