The Mechanics of Virtue, Matt Berry aphorism 8
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 projection, and this is why our reorientation toward reality is preceded by the deconstruction of self-interests. One has to take apart what lies between one’s inherited thoughts and the reality that made them and this “taking apart” is a negative process. When one accepts the “separation,” one is also aware of a precognitive unity which had been picked apart by the senses before being re-assembled in cognition, according to the interests of the evolved machine. This acceptance is also an awareness of unfragmented being — where consciousness is but a single portal to the unity that one is — the experience of which is positive.