The Experience of Clarity

The ego does not tolerate awareness of subordination, even though natural and social necessity is final. When we can’t shuffle things, we shuffle their values. The intellect grows like a rash with all this itching and scratching. * Confidence is in bed with certainty.   H ope is how a negative feeling pulls experimental futures over its head until it secures a positive reaction.

We praise selflessness. The mere idea of others sacrificing their own ego removes one more threat to our own.   * The stronger the dogma the lazier the faith.

A full stomach and no great task makes a fly your equal.

Asceticism comes natural to those whose suspicion of pleasure lacks restraint. * "He’s not smarter than the average person. He just suffers from a disability. He can’t pay attention to others’ narratives and so is consistently woken up with a deadline and only has his immediate reality to work with. "

The worst trade isn’t even a trade.   It is far better to uncover a single bias than hold onto the thousand opportunities it presents to us.

Necessity rules everything but our ability to pay attention. * When knowledge emerges from ignorance, danger separates from fear and can be dealt with. If an ounce of well-placed courage results in a pound of fear, then one is not fearless enough for knowledge. *   One should never take as an obstacle what is actually a causal relationship, unless one is in the business of preserving religion. *

Often the vices we need to “get by” preclude the obstacle altogether by stopping our march of thoughts in their tracks. We have removed the obstacle, from the mind , but with it the achievement is no longer in sight. Every grand achievement comes upon an object which must be surmounted. A vice which helped you “get by” the stress of an awareness of risk, now in the sobriety of that very forgetfulness pulls forward the would-have-been victory as the obstacle to vice. *   The vulnerable and incapable of defending themselves are the most likely to suffer constant trespassing by those with the most charitable feelings.   *   Human bias begins with earnest engagement.

There would be a greater benefit in a penciled-in equation that prevented a billion deaths, or educated a billion minds, except that it can not compensate the visible act of being today’s obvious hero in a way that gratifies those infected with an unexamined sympathy.   * A pure brand is something that you could not give away if it weren’t for sale.   * I’d rather be policed than engineered. With freedom as self-control comes the potential deviance by which the preservation of freedom requires the law. Living within a responsibly policed culture is itself a proof of freedom. If we should ever reach a state where police were no longer necessary, it would be because we had been reduced to safe and predictable cattle.      

Science is how a running hypothesis trips over the data to land on a result. *

Is it art if I am first obligated to distinguish it from the Beautiful? … Or is it just salesmanship? * An irritation is no longer a parasite if you make it a priority. It’s your host.

If you go faster than accuracy then you don’t really know where you are going.   If you go slower than in accuracy, you still don’t know where you are going, but then that is the point of slowing down. * When positive thinking is supposed to be superior to circumstance, it often sets in motion an unanticipated causal sequence, quite frequently, stagnation and   disappointment.   Only deconstructive thinking finds causal sequences, a constructive return for an investment in the negative.   I have a positive attitude about such negative thinking. * With science you can flip a fact and still learn a lot; with religion when you flip a fact you learn to never try that again.   * Science proceeds through “trial and error,” which sounds a whole lot better than “rationalized incompetence.”   Science in fact may be not much more than the competent recognition incompetence.   *     Cognitive dissonance is h...

Let the Will beware every quick victory over Circumstance . This is not flight, what you see.   His arrows only need distance. * Often we can identify our ignorance of self through cautious engagement with some part of our world to which we are highly sensitive.   It can provide in our responses the contours of the hidden subject, like clay pressed onto a veil and over some object behind it. The education of self requires a nearly impossible type of courage -- the courage to experience humiliation. It is however the most profitable form of courage to turn a weak spot into strength just by finding it . *   Positive thinking too often prefers the stimulus in positive grammar to the outcome of accurate thinking.

There is no such thing as achieving a genuine humility.   Humility is the only virtue given to those who could not achieve it. *   A moral system that assumes we are more than animal sacrifices to exhaustion all the virtues to receive the single blessing of humility. * One should never attempt a morality of love without first knowing who one’s enemies are.   You will not only injure yourself, but sully your perception of one of life’s highest investments.  

Let not the one hand see what the other doeth: On the one hand, morality seeks to purge itself of the animal; on the other hand, purging is animal. How does one dominate a reflex for domination? * He who hesitates often wins the race of not being wron g.   With a little reticence the paralysis of Will can even claim genius. Given the absurdity of the many “opportunities” we pursue, in the comparison, it may even be genius to have just enough intelligence to be confused. * Observation depends upon the inversion of the power ratio of self-to-deed: the ego must stop itself to see the crack in consciousness and remain small enough to secure the leverage.    * Is it perhaps due to natural selection that our youth often crave “wicked” symbolism? Intelligence is not necessarily a moral event, but shouldn’t morality necessarily require our intelligent inspection of values? And if Morality has a duty to proceed intelligently, what do we call it when...

We more readily expound upon Good and Evil when we know nothing about them as consequences. Our personal bondage depends upon this preclusion. It is in fact the foundation of an authoritative structure to maintain an unexamined assumption that moral judgments themselves are removed from human mechanics. How much Evil in the world will simply vanish when we finally understand the conditions which make up our assumptions of “Good”? * Reality is shallow; Truth is deep.   The errors and deceptions that we stand upon must be dug through, and thus the illusion.  In the end, there will be no more truths; only reality.     * How the world really works … It is an experience of depth to respect the shallow.   All genuine elucidation feels rewarded by this inverse relation of the experience to the reality, of our increased potential by the simplification of what had heretofore existed beyond our comprehension. * We ignore pre-cognitive mec...

* What is the difference between superstition and established religion? Superstitions are primitive and religions are more advanced. The former creates an imaginary threat. The latter developed an imaginary rescue to its imaginary threat. * The mind is unable to bear a contradiction against itself. He would sooner lose himself in a thousand crossword puzzles than sit for five minutes in his own thought. The contradiction is so prominent, so obvious to the solitary thinker that he is forced to hunt down an external duty to occupy his mind – or grapple with himself. And one who grapples with himself expands himself – finds another door in the “labyrinth of the breast.”   We do not fear the locked door.     We fear that the door might actually open. To believe the door is locked relieves us of our task.   One’s own contradiction is either a locked door or a crack that one recognizes and crawls through to continue the journey.   *   ...

There is only the present time.   It is memory that exists; not the past. History is a set of recorded events accompanying us in the form of present stimuli.   Memory is a doubled edged tool and we have needs. Even the hardest facts are carried forward as if braille in soft clay; we change our history by reading it.   *     An observer cannot be robbed: there are no interruptions when observation of immediate reality is the goal.   He observes immediate reality or he defines it.   Either way, the interruption or the act of definition is how an observer loses himself – this self or that self.  * In recollecting our youth we realize that some of the confusion was not ours, but that those who made bad choices, or never had the courage to make a critical choice, needed to rewrite “our” thoughts in order to confirm their redeeming narrative – to paint over their confusion. They disguised themselves   as “teachers.”

”Sincerity” is too tender to work for a genuine morality.   A genius never enlightened a society where honesty was not at first social suicide. * A mistake is a mistake only so long as it continues. Once we stop it, it redeems itself as education.   *          

The defining characteristic of “criminal” is necessity. We are more likely to jail a poor man whose tangible theft was something closer to rational behavior due to necessity than a rich man whose mass theft can only be proven through statistical analysis and who lacked any other motive than to coin his ego for all to see.   * Outspending the other side of the table settles so many legal disputes that one only needs an attorney if one cannot afford one. *   If the arbitrary bending of our values is immoral, then nothing is more wicked than the path to self-esteem.   It is a house of mirrors.   Social perception does not push our self-esteem so much as perceived social perception pulls it. We bend the already bent as we take it in and leave ourselves with more or less than we deserve.    *   He is never trespassed by the inevitable who quickly assumes the role of a host. *   The charge against “expediency” can itself be a...

Lazy is more likely to complain about lazy than work even has time for.

Truth is as dark as it is light. Honesty is the thing, and there is much to learn from the dark. *       Failure is the deception that you have lost something.

* It has been said that the difference between the animal and the human is the latter’s greater ability to defer pleasure.   But what has been said about the difference between one human’s enduring religion and another’s waning ability to postpone certainty? *   Faith is the ability to postpone certainty … the obvious.   This great inner force permits uncertainty to continue in a form very much like, in all respects except the name, doubt .   It prefers to call itself, a “mystery.”  

Where it is possible to be more honest with others than morality affords, one redeems intelligence with that morality, and morality with that intelligence – by remaining silent.  

To be considered genuine, one can never be less honest than perception requires, nor more than decency affords. To be genuine one must survive the question intact: reputation or ethic?

The restriction of our freedom liberates us. There are so many different ways to end with only one choice and so few to end with many.