The Experience of Clarity

412 Looking down on a valley from a restful state, one that required no sacrifices, is not the same as looking down on that same valley from a height acquired through sacrifice ... from a distance of exhilaration.  One viewer never fully understands the other, yet each presumes to share the same wonder or boredom. Along these same lines, within a single human, the error-making organ is incapable of leaning on its next state ... does not even believe in its existence.  From one moment to the next, one can pass through tremendous leaps of the “spirit” ... a single letter in the mail, for example, can send one floating toward bliss or sinking into despair.  This current frame of reference, filled or emptied of the stuff of life, is both the beginning and the end.  That we are in a new room is certain, but we fail to find a door. There must have been times when a human has, out of despair, decided to end life by leaping from a tall building.  By the t...

248 There is a euphoria in having rational justification on one’s side ... of feeling superior through the mere exposure of error.  We rarely have the presence of mind to construct a human strategy which includes this narcotic of condemning error and exposing scoundrels.

413 The object is to get the illusion to hover as closely to the surface as possible, since that is where the energy is.  To put it another way, only the surface can increase the value of the illusion.

249 Through the worship of God, the priest gained advantage, got even, or got by.  But out of the same motivation the atheist worships concepts.  It is a point worth repeating: he worships concepts by that same mechanism which formerly as a theist he had worshipped gods.  Now he worships the gods of Extreme Honesty and Integrity as they appear upon the screen of consciousness, and as if there were no projectors to account for them .   He claims his motive ... his cause.  He draws geometric lines between the projections on his screen and calls this method, “ causality. ” Of course, he has a motive.  What were we thinking?  It is to secure integrity .  And seeking integrity is the first cause toward the effect of having integrity. He has his goal, “integrity,” and it is indeed a stimulus toward a display of fearless honesty.  But out of what material has the goal itself been constructed?  The machine took in its circu...

414 I am long past trying to see behind the fact or wanting the idea to separate from and levitate above the fact.  The sentence is not the magic, but the lovely assistant.  She knows and sees the sleight of hand ... stands beside the fact and helps the illusion succeed.  At best, a fact in a sentence is a trick and only with this magic can truth convince.

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 u...

415 There is no soul, and yet we have our words.  There is no magic, and yet we have become magicians.  Perhaps it is the thrill of deception, of taking in, not only the audience, but ourselves as well .  We lift our brows before the sleight of our own hands ... forget our own mirrors, lighting and shadows ... and then one day, we look the girl in the face and hesitate, the saw in our hands, and she, doing her best to mask a fear.