The Experience of Clarity

To speak the truth is to tell the oldest or newest lie.  Ultimately, there are no truths there is only reality.   

It takes more intelligence to tell your opponent that you’re not smart enough to make 2 + 2 equal their 5 than to prove that such an ass is worthy of an ass’s time.

The elimination of falsehood ends in more substance than does the pursuit of truth. That’s because cognition is its own event but thinks that it can be what merely describes.   It even thinks it can be the truth itself, something other than a useful signpost.   Denying the mind its credibility is a step toward affirming reality, including our own larger self.

Hypocrisy is not the greatest sin one can commit. A conscious hypocrite is more honest than those who remain unaware of their slips -- morality is their light and way, stage lighting to send all their little inconsistencies scurrying into the shadows of denial. And an honest, arrogant, and amoral being has not played a part in a moral role play, being then incapable of a decent, moderating hypocrisy.

A faith that rejects clear thinking, rejects God’s created reality, rejecting God.   A Devil would prefer such confusion. A hardworking, honest and fearless reasoning does not need a label, and it doesn’t really know where it’s going because it doesn’t begin with an answer, but in the comparison is more worthy of the definition for “Faith.”

Ego extends so far as the inability to calculate that the border between egos is still ego.

Don’t forget to save yourself in the end with the knowledge that regret too has its assumptions. * How far do the lies go? All the way through the healing gauze.

Someone who has never made a mistake knows exactly who he is, but not what he is.   * When the refusal to beg the questions precludes too many answers, the human solution is to be the problem.

The pursuit of clarity is more closely related to a breakdown than to sanity. Sanity depends upon leaving the acceptable delusions and prejudices of one’s culture unchallenged; a breakdown is finding oneself at odds with cognition because one has discovered this. * Social affinities and aversions have the strength to leave the forensic mind   peerless. * When our delusions succeed, we gain confidence and friends. But when our illusions fail, it is our education that succeeds, our reputation.  

The idea only precedes reality because it succeeded arrogance, which itself succeeded insecurity. * If you build it they will come; just be sure to set that first brick in front of their destination. *   Fortune gives you quantities; misfortune, qualities.   Dare, and you cannot lose, if you always take something away from the venture.  

The whole truth and nothing but the truth: If I am correct that the cause is as deep as I say it is then I have to forgive in proportion: just because another is made aware of his cause does not remove him from being its effect. Here , if I don’t find myself wrong at the moment I cast blame on another, do I only fail to reveal my own deep cause? If I do, can I forgive myself by the same awareness? … And why isn’t awareness itself sufficient to correct my behavior?   The dominance reflex keeps us stupid, especially when it is responsible for the truth-event. Is it really our truth if it is triggered by something other than intelligence? Can it be an understanding of my whole anatomy to find the unintelligent reflex of dominating by truths itself dominated by animal behavior?   Do we need the expense? Is it only wasted on gratification? Or do we simply fail to value clarity to the point of sufficiency?

If you can do what you want but not the way you want to do it you will soon “want” what they want. * The stronger response to the predicament of clarity is to weaken our argument.   We declare that we can never be wholly objective while never serving as evidence.

It is true that ninety-nine percent of the effort is dumb power and not intelligence.   But it is also true that the inertia behind the largest ship is ninety-nine percent steel and power, but that remaining one percent is the rudder.   Never underestimate how much so little can do. * A fact without adequate interpretation is a form of trespassing.   *   History is the survival of those details most fit to a culture’s equilibrium. *   Hindsight is only twenty-twenty because as time passes there are fewer and fewer challenges to prejudice. * For meaningful truth, the simpler it is, the more courage it takes, but that is all it takes. Otherwise you would already have it.   The more complicated the truth, the more likely you are merely too timid for relevant truth.

Given the interference of ego, we know more of what we need to know by reaching for less. *   Even our most confident expressions of our reality are themselves articulated within nature. Imagination is either a balance or counterbalance, not to our reality, but to our perception of reality. Our present illusion teeters atop misunderstandings, which themselves teeter atop our as yet unchallenged ground.   We feel most in balance when we successfully resist reality, and out of balance when we embrace it.

The future is really a species of memory. And the memory is made up of items suitable for present equilibrium, especially as one fact and not another might serve as ballast for a teetering social relationship.   Our accuracy with the past and future are never more vulnerable nor strongly felt than during a realignment of friends and foes.  

Conceptually, we are not as complex as we need to be. The irreconcilability of the mind and body stems from our panic at every hint of their inseparability.   We are not lost, we’re afraid.   * Discipline is about understanding limits, even its own. There is such a thing as pushing discipline so far that it limits its worth.   *   The restraint in prudence applies to prudence; there are extreme moments that require extreme wagers or remedies.     *   If one has talent and resource, extreme prudence is the blunder. At some point we should worry about not taking any risks. * It is better to have a dozen parasites than a single host.   * A true indulgence makes substance out of nothing. It isn’t something you get; it’s something you ‘miss out on.’ The more you get the less you feel in the satisfaction, and the less you get the more substantial your cravings make it. We want our lives to be substantial.   An...

It’s as easy to be disciplined about the future as it is to neglect our dependence on the present. *   It’s not really discipline if it doesn’t live on the edge of instability.

When logic fails and Law of Effect saves: Reverence for daily opinion is how we take the conclusions of others as our own premises. We, the civilized, live in a funhouse: the conclusions we draw from each other often thrill or terrify us without any real basis or corresponding outcome. Nonetheless, civilization herself is subordinate to nature, fencing off only the awareness of the wild. In immediate distraction, we distance awareness from real, immediate risks. So while it is true that the examination of each up and down of daily opinion begins with unstable premises, it is also true that not using the butterflies in one’s stomach as an impulse for examination is the only way to have a great time on an unfinished rollercoaster.

Honesty and deception reverse values as they cross a border between patriots at war. This figure 8 in morals is very curious when the borders crossed are between genuine attempts at dogma, since one of the deceived must also include oneself.

There is more work in sustained leisure than laziness can think through. * Freedom is having choices, but one has no choices without a state of indecision. Knowing the values of each option, eliminates all lower valued options. Who prefers freedom to knowledge of values? * When gifts cost too much, independence was never cheaper. It is better to own half a loaf of bread than to gather up two loaves from someone else’s trail of breadcrumbs.

The ignorance that stops you in your tracks has more intelligence behind it than a vast body of knowledge that sends you headlong into the future. * Memo to a religious founder:  Faith is not our incapacity for the negative unless its consequences are outside of our reach. * Get past the primer and fully into the reaction: What happens when we put ourselves in a position that results in self-loathing just so that we can imagine that others do not hate us? What if the condition for loving oneself required an acceptance that others just might hate us for our self-respect?  How would one feel that hatred?