The Experience of Clarity

129 I would have every thought stoop and touch the Earth but that I already know the impossibility of the effort.  A thought seems to have a life of its own and would rather leave itself open to flattering interpretations. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

8 When a thing is not what I say it is, I tell a lie.  But the word itself is not the thing it designates, in the same sense that the finger pointing to the North is not the North.  In this sense all explanations are not the realities they believe themselves to be, and to “get back” to their source-experience is to sneak forward into another reality.  A thought is a species of expression.  A thought that is its own source-experience is as impossible as to put an apple back on the tree.  One must let those thoughts go and pick a few others off of this new experience.  It is the best we can do.   There is the thought, its source, and its target. These “three” are only a singular misunderstanding.  When one accepts their “separation,” one sees explanations flicker between true and false by the power of their contradiction, as the pieces take themselves briefly for one another.  What happens? Reality precedes cognitive projection, but thought can only begin as that project

130 A work of art, like the artist, is only as strong as it stands alone ... only as rich as that which it makes its own. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

9 It is a morality hard enough for reality only if it is of and for that reality. What the senses cut up and take in, cognition returns in its own form.  The positive function of cognitive truths is to align the mind to its reality, not to pass themselves off as reality itself — for example, not as air-vibrations provoking a conditioned response of believing itself not to be such.  To fulfill its positive function, Truth forever compromises itself for the realization of the moralist.  If not, then the morality itself is the original sin. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

10 One is often guilty of cynicism because one had a share in the villain's cruelty by exposing the victim to his own duping. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

131 On dangerous books: Sometimes I read, not to discover a beneficial influence, but to free myself from the requirements of a stronger existence, a reading which keeps all of the more difficult choices just out of reach. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

11 Wherever the beauty in the lie is its truthfulness, its preachers will cultivate cynics.  These ugly ones indulge the power to shock from under the cloak of integrity. The herd circles and tightens in defense.  The lie becomes stronger, and strength is beautiful. The sheep do their part.  Weakness comes with the grip of its own insecurity.  They grip their answer with greater strength when it exists to do away with the question that atomizes them into the real.  Too frightened to investigate ... ignorance is a weakness so immovable it refutes itself in behavior as a kind of strength after all.  Reality steps upon the resilient presumptions of man, and error rises up with the human power to deny it.  The cynic does his part.  He presents the rude truth.  The flock circles and tightens in defense.  The lie actually becomes stronger in proportion to its insecure relation to its own source.  And strength among one’s own is always seductive.  What is now immovably fixed in the

132 It is not that I want to read so few books; it is just that I refuse to learn from those same few books those very lessons which experience teaches me much later.  All of my reading pours through me as if I were a sieve.  Once in a rare while a word knots up with an event and plugs the mesh.  I manage to retain a little more in my small pool of wisdom.  Certain books promote this knotting and clogging more than others.  I have no choice but to limit my reading to them. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

12 Is it really pessimistic to deconstruct all mentalisms that obscure one’s own comprehension?  I suppose it could be, but mostly for those whose tender presumptions are so vulnerable that their thoughts exist to pre-empt other, more relevant thoughts, obscuring precisely the reality that makes this evasion possible, and with such an outrageous insecurity and solid ignorance, that thought itself experiences the resistance as a stout courage and unlimited source of mental optimism ... of faith in the anti-real.   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

133 There is no writer so great he cannot be done without. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

13 One should be very careful when denouncing cynicism. It is sometimes how we avoid the pain of taking a hook out of our jaws. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

134 The proud mind denies the existence of the stimulus in an argument, and so does not see or feel the force of the necessary response, creating the illusion that it is not the perceiver but the world that is twisted.   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

14 The public sees no difference between a lack of restraint and cynical truth.  But a finer intellect can see this from two angles.  First, the public sees no difference between conventional propriety and Truth, and second, both the lack of restraint and the exposure of self-interest prick the undiscerning in the same spot, in the same way.  This is why today we have one word — “cynicism” — for two very distinct events and how Diogenes’ legacy has doubled its original ambiguity.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

136 One day I woke up and found that everyone I had ever met was either a fool or a liar.  Another day, much later, I found that this had been my first real step toward myself. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

15 We may love our enemies, but not under the same conditions with which we love our friends. A word is a sound designating something.  Where we use one sound for two distinct situations and their respective behavioral reactions, we really should invent another sound.   As it is now, our seeing different behavior under singular labels is what others can only see as our cynical treatment of moral concepts.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

137 The next question is not, “Can we live in spite of our awareness?”  nor, “Would it be better to go back to sleep?”  but, “Can we live by this awareness?”   A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism