The Illusory Truth

Op. 06

THE ILLUSORY TRUTH

Multigenre Philosophy

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CONTENTS

PART ONE: APHORISTIC ESSAYS

1. The Philosopher as Man, Not Machine

2. Two Types of Thinker

3. Thinking Should Be Difficult

4. A Justification of Boredom

5. Ultimate Justice

6. No Escaping Evil

7. The Way it Has To Be

8. No Hope without Fear

9. Twenty Mistaken Ideas

10. Slightly Existential

11. Words as Our 'Reality'

12. Partly Our Creation

13. Truths but No Truth

14. Reality and Realities

15. Human Diversity

16. No Two Alike

17. Time Belongs to Man

18. Inevitably Unreasonable

19. Puppets of Life

20. The Negative Root

21. The Struggle for Happiness

22. Work and Play

23. No Freedom without Bondage

24. From Winter to Autumn

25. No 'Mother Nature'

26. Male and Female Pride

27. Against Folly

28. Suspended Judgement

29. Against Reincarnation

30. Superstition Universal

31. The End of the World

32. Art as Ideality

33. Great Art

34. No Health without Disease

35. Illness No Objection

36. The 'Plimsoll Line' of Sleep

37. A Wider View of Vice

38. Misused Concepts

39. Against Racial Inequality

40. The Transience of Death

41. Philosophy verses Insular Intolerance

42. Individual Wisdom

43. The Meaning and Purpose of Life

44. The Inferior Negative

45. Four Categories

46. Negatives Serve

47. Successful Failures

48. Positively Selfish

49. A Posthumous B.C.

50. Schismatic Christianity

51. Live Symbols

52. Interplanetary Equilibrium

53. Magnetic Reciprocities

54. Universe or Universes

55. Between Good and Evil

PART TWO: ESSAYISTIC APHORISMS

PART THREE: APHORISMS (MAXIMS)

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PART ONE: APHORISTIC ESSAYS

THE PHILOSOPHER AS MAN, NOT MACHINE: How often should a philosopher actually allow himself to think, if he is to remain a relatively sane, active, healthy individual, and not degenerate into some kind of impersonal thinking machine?� Should he go out of his way to think objectively when there is no apparent necessity for him to do so (as, for example, when he isn't officially working), to drive his thought patterns over the bounds of moderation to such an extent that he defies the urge to variety in life and is eventually consumed, like Nietzsche, by an obsession with thought, becomes saddled, as it were, with a plethora of intellectual superfluities?

�� Undoubtedly, a man who regards himself as a thinker must think sometimes.� But an over-fastidious approach to thinking, an over-obdurate inclination to think at any cost could very soon render him anomalous, foolish, trivial, stolid, boring, and unbalanced - to name just a few things.� For whether or not the most thought-obsessed people realize it, there is more to life than thinking, and a need certainly exists in people for adherence to a given physiological situation - as, for example, in refraining from thought when the need to do so is patently obvious.

�� If, therefore, a so-called thinker is to avoid becoming an intellectual crank, he must respect his periodically natural inclination to thoughtlessness and not endeavour, by contrast, to continue thinking when the energy or requirement to do so is no longer there.� Otherwise he may subsequently degenerate, if he doesn't suffer a mental breakdown, into some kind of intellectual freak - in other words, into someone who imagines that he ought to think as much as possible, no matter what the circumstances, in order to remain a philosopher, a man of genius, a cut above the common herd.� Philosophy, however, refuses to take such nonsense seriously!� For the true philosopher always goes his way as a man, not as a thinking machine.

TWO TYPES OF THINKER: It is wrong to assume that a man obsessed with thought is necessarily a thinker, a philosopher, a genius. �For when a man is compelled to think out of habit from fear of not thinking, of not appearing to be enough of a thinker in his own eyes, there is a reasonable chance that he is less a philosopher than a dupe of his own illusions, a slave of a mentality which assumes it necessary for a thinker to think as much as possible, regardless of the subject or context, if he is to remain a philosopher and not degenerate into an average mind.� The idea of thinking, in such a head, is ultimately more important than what is actually being thought about.

�� For it must be admitted, from the converse standpoint, that a genuine thinker - a man, in other words, who thinks not merely for the sake of flattering his ego or filling a vacuum but, more importantly, in order to discover something new about the world he lives in and the best methods of adjusting himself to it - will always stop himself thinking beyond a certain length of time simply because experience and common sense will have taught him that that is the best course to follow if he is to remain relatively natural, sane, perceptive, lucid, and mentally resilient.� As a thinker, in this context, he will know that his chief duty is towards himself, and not only for himself but inevitably for the sake of other people as well; that his intelligence should therefore be used to his advantage - as, unfortunately, is rarely the case with the other type of thinker, a type who, obsessed by the urge to think, is essentially a pathological phenomenon, scarcely a man of wisdom.� For philosophy should have earnest connections, after all, with the art of living wisely.

THINKING SHOULD BE DIFFICULT: It is just as well that, for the vast majority of people, so-called objective thinking is so difficult, that even those of us who habitually regard ourselves as 'thinkers' are normally compelled to fight and sweat for our deepest thoughts.� Were this not the case, were we not the hard-pressed slaves of thought, it is highly probable that thinking alone would preoccupy us, and to such an extent and with such intensity that we would be left with little time or inclination for anything else.

�� Indeed, those of us who make a daily commitment to putting thoughts on paper are only too aware of how difficult serious thinking really is, and consequently of how pointless it would be for us to complain against this fact or to criticize ourselves for not thinking well enough.� Yet if work were always easy, if brilliant ideas invariably came to us without any difficulty, what challenge would there be in doing it?� And how many of us would really care to have above-average thoughts flowing through our heads all day anyway, thoughts which never allow us to rest but, as though prompted by a psychic conveyor-belt, continue to plague our consciousness from morning till night?

�� If, as Bergson contended, the brain really is a limiting device, an organ which, in addition to storing verbal concepts, usually prevents us from thinking too much too easily and too continuously, then it is just as well that it actually works, that we aren't subjected to an unceasing barrage of brilliant and highly irrelevant ideas all day, but are forced to put some effort into extracting any worthwhile thoughts from it.� Was this not the case, I rather doubt that I should have found either the time or the inclination to record such seemingly gratified thoughts as these!

A JUSTIFICATION OF BOREDOM: If man is protected against his thoughts by generally finding it difficult to think (by which I mean to think objectively, constructively, and continuously - in other words, above the usual plane of subjective considerations, incidental fragments, brief recollections, disconnected words, casual street-sign readings, intuitive insights, etc., and beyond the moods or situations when thinking of one kind or another comes most naturally to him), then one might justifiably contend that he is protected against too much mental and physical inertia by the intermittent prevalence of boredom, that scourge of the idle.

�� To most people, particularly the more intelligent ones, boredom is a distinctly disagreeable condition, an emptiness usually leading to self-contempt, which suffices to goad them into doing something absorbing, into losing and rediscovering themselves in some preoccupation, some form of activity or stimulant.� Now if boredom had absolutely no place in their lives, if mere existence sufficed to content them (as appears to be the case with a majority of animals), what do you suppose would happen?� Do you suppose, for instance, that they would really do anything, would, in fact, be capable of living at all?� The prevalence of hunger, thirst, lust, changes in the weather, etc., would doubtless oblige them to satisfy their respective physical needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.� But, having done so, what would they then have to live for afterwards?

�� Without boredom there would have been no civilization - no art, science, religion, politics, philosophy, music, sport, travel, evolution.� In fact, without boredom there would probably have been nothing of any consequence whatsoever.� For boredom is akin to an eternal whip!

ULTIMATE JUSTICE: Whenever something happens it happens for a good reason.� Once a cause is committed to an effect there is no turning it back.� There is no such thing as an accident which should have happened but didn't.� A near-miss is a near-miss and not an accident, even if the potential of an accident existed for a time.� An accident which should happen will always happen if the circumstances demand it.

�� Therefore whenever a person secretly or openly condemns nature for its apparent injustice, for the fact, let us say, that lightning struck a tree and killed someone sheltering beneath its branches, or that a flood swept over a town and killed people and damaged property, or that a volcano erupted and spilled molten lava down onto some nearby townsfolk - whenever, I say, a person condemns nature on these and similar accounts, understandable though his condemnation may be, he is unwittingly turning his back on justice, on the justice of a world which would seem to be saying: This cause is bound to have a specific effect; if people are in the way of it, then that is their fault.� 'A' must lead to 'B' whatever the consequences or, put mathematically, 2 x 2 = 4 and not 5, 6, or 7.� If you happen to be sheltering beneath the branches of a tree when lightning strikes it (and the lightning couldn't help arising), then you must suffer the consequences.� If, by any chance, you sometime happen to be in the path of oncoming lava, you must now accept the fact that it wasn't necessarily destined to kill anyone but will only kill or maim people if they are rash, unfortunate, ignorant, or brave enough to dwell under a volcano's shadow.� To suggest that the eruption shouldn't occur would be as unreasonable as to suggest that mutually attractive men and women shouldn't fall in love, or that 2 x 2 shouldn't equal 4, or that a poison berry shouldn't prove highly detrimental to its eater.� For whenever something happens, it does so for a good reason.

�� An earthquake, for example, which has to occur because secretly engendered by some planetary necessity which, unbeknown to man, simultaneously safeguards and maintains the overall stability of the planet, is not by any means guaranteed to occur in close proximity to human dwellings.� But if it does so, one ought to bear in mind that (1) it had to occur in consequence of a combination of subterranean planetary influences; (2) the people killed and/or injured by it will normally represent only a tiny percentage of the total human population of the globe, a percentage which will either die or suffer injury as a sacrifice, so to speak, for the overall welfare of mankind in general; (3) these same people might not have been afflicted by it had they built their dwellings elsewhere, or if technology had evolved an efficient early-warning system which could pinpoint the anticipated place of the quake and thereby give inhabitants there sufficient time to abandon their dwellings and move to the nearest safety zone.�

�� Like molten lava, hurricanes, floods, typhoons, and lightning, the earthquake kills indiscriminately, but it only kills what is in its way.� Hideous as these things usually are, a majority of us would probably prefer the occasional emergence of potentially death-engendering planetary phenomena to the wholesale destruction of the planet itself brought about by a gigantic explosion in the bowls of the earth.� Large-scale explosions fostered by man are undoubtedly dreadful enough.� But experience of a gigantic 'natural' explosion which ultimately tore the entire planet apart would be far worse!� For where the elements rule, the elements decide.

�� If earthquakes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, etc., were not necessary, they wouldn't happen.� Admittedly, science can give man the advantage of anticipating them and even of directing the force of various outbreaks of natural violence into a particular area or spot, as with lightning conductors.� But a civilization which got to a point of trying to prevent the emergence of such phenomena could eventually find itself paying the price of frustrating a series of comparatively minor disturbances by subsequently bringing upon itself the horrendous devastation of a major one.� For sooner or later a phenomenon which has been frustrated or repressed too long will explode with a force that would have made the force of its previously unchecked explosion seem relatively harmless.�

�� Now what applies to the external world of nature doubtless applies no less to the internal world of the psyche, where neuroses and psychoses are the price one must occasionally pay for one's sanity.

NO ESCAPING EVIL: To a certain extent every age turns a blind eye towards most of its chief evils.� One of the main reasons for this is undoubtedly helplessness, but others also include indifference, laziness, societal hostility, class rivalry, moral hypocrisy, ignorance, lack of imagination, and - probably most common of all - the inborn inclination of a majority of people to take matters more or less for granted.

�� Knowing this to be the case, however, one should nonetheless endeavour to attribute a reasonable justification to this string of evils (whatever they happen to be and wherever they happen to flourish).� For not only do they constitute a very common, perennial, and ineradicable element in the life of a nation at any given time but, more importantly, they also constitute a very worthwhile element in the protection of that nation's psychic equilibrium, since without its evil side it would have nothing good to boast of, and therefore be unable to exist.� Paradoxical though it may seem, it is important to note that evils of one kind or another will always exist, no matter what the gonfalon, for the good of the people.� The assertion, however, that they don't exist when it is patently obvious they do, is in itself a clear example of a particular kind of evil which is fairly constant among certain individuals and institutions in every age.

�� Granted, then, that an age may be justified in turning a 'blind eye' to most of its chief evils, in pretending them not to exist and quite often in not knowing of their existence, it nonetheless has to be said that under no circumstances would it be justified in categorically denying their existence, in asserting them to be a figment of the popular imagination, since such an absurd attitude would amount to a veritable refutation of all life.� It would, in fact, amount to something gravely unjustifiable in a world where antitheses are ever the mean!

�� The fact, however, that society is relatively integrated in every age stands to reason.� For no matter what the situation, no matter how bad things may appear, good and evil must always co-exist in various degrees and guises, according to whether a nation is at peace or at war, even if a number of the standards concerning the respective criteria of good and evil are constantly being changed or modified in order to meet the demands of the occasion.� What man ought to know,� and too often forgets (though this is probably just as well), is that nature is ultimately wiser than he, that he is the product of nature and consequently is guided and motivated by it in every age, irrespective of what the chief political, social, religious, moral, economic, agricultural, or industrial priorities may happen to be at any given time.

�� The endeavour to create a perfect human society is inevitably a gross self-deception.� For man can never attain to a society where, presumably, everyone will be equal and all the assumed evil elements be eliminated, when the essential nature of existence demands our acceptance of and acquiescence in the continuous interplay of polar opposites: good and evil, rich and poor, truth and illusion, ruling and ruled, noble and plebeian, etc., under virtually every gonfalon throughout history.� Were mankind ever destined to arrive at such a 'perfect society', it would undoubtedly constitute something distinctly imperfect, anomalous, and insufferable.� In sum, one can only rob Peter to pay Paul.

THE WAY IT HAS TO BE: Every age contains its quota of horrors, exploitations, superstitions, taboos, stupidities, illusions, crimes, diseases, accidents, mistakes, etc., and the modern age is clearly no exception.� Assuming the human kind are not eradicated in any future world war, it is quite conceivable that the more intelligent members of� generations to come may look back in dread, amazement, and even bewilderment at many of the circumstances which a majority of people take for granted today, just as, in focusing their critical attention upon a number of the (to them) most unacceptable aspects of the Victorian Age, people today often tend to disapprove of child labour, slave labour, the imprisonment of children, compulsory naval and military service, birching, hanging, and the extreme levels of social deprivation which existed among the very poor in relation to education, housing, sanitation, health, diet, employment, and earnings.

�� But the more fortunate members of a future generation - one existing, say, about a hundred years from now - may well have sound reason to be shocked, surprised, bewildered, or even amused by knowledge of the fact that a majority of late-twentieth-century people lived quite complacently in an age of widespread pollution, excessive noise, traffic congestion, overcrowding, cigarette smoking, drug addiction, alcoholism, cancer, the five-day week, metropolitan loneliness, tinned food, bottled milk, capitalist/socialist antagonism, the threat of nuclear war, religious anachronisms, life-imprisonment, impersonal bureaucracy, dogs' mess on pavements, regular strikes, widespread unemployment, redundancies, football hooliganism, and spiritual deprivation.�

�� However, whether we like it or not, that is the way it has to be.� For the virtues of one age are almost invariably the vices of another, the vices of one age the virtues of another, and no age is totally perfect.

NO HOPE WITHOUT FEAR: Every life is subject to the intermittent prevalence of fear.� When a man pretends exemption from fear, it should be evident that he is almost certainly deluded, ignorant, forgetful, superficial, or just a plain liar.� For, in reality, no man can be exempted from fear - not, anyway, while he lives anything approximating to a normal, healthy, thought-ridden existence.

�� But let us take a closer look at this matter and unashamedly draw up a fairly comprehensive list of the most common fears, particularly those which regularly plague the male mind: fear of losing one's job, of having an accident, of becoming dangerously ill, of going deaf and/or blind, of being sent to gaol, of becoming impotent, of not succeeding in one's work, of going mad, of being taken for a fool, of losing one's intellectual powers, of being misunderstood, of being rebuffed by a woman to whom one is attracted, of being exploited, of being trapped in an ungainly situation, of losing someone one loves, of insomnia, of solitude, of idleness, of disgrace, of heights, of flying, of neurosis, of drugs, of arousing the hostility or contempt of one's neighbours and colleagues, of the unknown, of bullies, of thugs, of making a woman pregnant against one's wishes, of crowds, of changing one's habits too often, of certain authorities, of what people may be saying about one behind one's back, of being made to look a fool, of being late for work, of oversleeping, of too much responsibility, of violence, of incompatibility with another person, of premature ejaculation, of having one's creative work rejected, of being noticed by certain people, of nightmares, of not appearing to be brave enough, of not meeting the right sort of people, of meeting the wrong sort of people, of being completely alone in one's old age, of being struck by lightning, of being mugged or robbed, of going bald, of catching a cold, of being alone in the dark, of losing money, of missing an appointment, of telling a lie, of the police, of strangers, etc.

�� From this fairly generalized list of the most common male fears (though many of them will doubtless be shared by females as well), one can see just how pervasive fear really is in life.� Not one of us who cannot admit to having fears about some of the things in the above list and/or to having previously overcome or outgrown certain other fears there.� Not a day passes but either something in or beyond the above list troubles our worry-strained minds.� But could one imagine what it would be like to live totally without fear?� Not if one is sufficiently human!� For, as the philosopher Hume indicated, without fear there would be no hope, and without hope there would be no life.

TWENTY MISTAKEN IDEAS: As some modern philosophers have informed us, there are always a large number of universally mistaken ideas to which many people are grudgingly apt to cling, despite their proven fallibility.� Here, for the sake of exposing some of them, as well as perhaps following in the hallowed footsteps of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell, I list twenty ideas which strike me as being in this category:-

�� 1.�� The Universe consists of the solar system and the stars;

�� 2. � Space is finite;

�� 3. � Man is by nature purely rational;

�� 4. � Goodness can exist independently of evil;

�� 5. � Man is imperfect because he makes mistakes;

�� 6. � Man can live without illusions;

�� 7. � The proper sphere of art is truth;

�� 8. � The sun revolves around the earth;

�� 9. � Population in no way conditions human behaviour;

�� 10.�� The most spiritual people are of necessity the least sensuous;�

�� 11.�� Violence is unnecessary;

�� 12.�� Religion is unnecessary;

�� 13.�� Happiness is the absence of pain;

�� 14.�� The survival of death is no mere hypothesis;

�� 15.�� Life is enriched by suffering;

�� 16.�� There is no moral-world-order;

�� 17.�� God is nature;

�� 18.�� The object of progress is to minimize pain;

�� 19.�� Man is immune to the influence of his external environment;

�� 20.�� Solitary people are invariably lonely.

SLIGHTLY EXISTENTIAL: To acquire a contemporary understanding of what Schopenhauer meant by the world 'as our idea', or what it means to be living in a material world which is partly fashioned by man, one need only endeavour to imagine how an animal or a bird would view its immediate surroundings ... how, for instance, an ordinary grey pigeon would see such inventions as a pillar box, a telephone kiosk, a car, motorcycle, lamppost, statue, traffic light, clock tower, or notice board.�

�� Taken from what one imagines to be a pigeon's point-of-view, one might suppose such human inventions to be of relatively little significance, to be mere 'things' without names or apparent significance upon which the pigeon can rest or about which it must move.� Whether, in fact, our pigeon sees the pillar box as a large red 'thing' or not, one can be fairly confident that it possesses no equivalent symbol for 'red', that it can only see the pillar box as something describing a particular shape and hue which is different from other shapes and hues, and which may or may not attract its attention on that account.

�� Therefore the world evidently presents a very different face to a pigeon than what it generally does to a human being, and this difference, this conglomeration of nondescript, nameless, purposeless, and possibly colourless 'things', lends an extra dimension to what Schopenhauer meant by the proposition 'the world is my idea', a world not only dependent on the peculiar nature of human consciousness and of the relative distortion or subjectivity which that consciousness necessarily imposes upon it but, in addition, one largely fashioned by man for the benefit of men and having, on that account, no similar common reality for anything else, be it pigeon, sparrow, mouse, cat, squirrel, or dog - other, of course, than in the very basic and self-evident sense of presenting external 'things'.

WORDS AS OUR 'REALITY': In the human world there are 'tall trees', 'green leaves', 'blades of grass', and 'grey clouds', but in the animal, bird, and insect worlds there are no such descriptions.� Such creatures see the world openly, nakedly, devoid of adjectives and nouns.� From their point of view cats do not lie in 'the grass', birds do not perch in 'trees', and bees do not pollinate 'flowers'.� What we have conveniently taken for their reality is only relevant to ourselves, since to a cat there is no such thing as 'grass', to a bird there are no such things as 'trees', and to a bee there are no such things as 'flowers'.� Neither are they aware that leaves are 'green' or clouds 'grey'.� In fact, they do not even know what leaves or clouds are, being so utterly accustomed to living in a world without description.

�� But to ask ourselves a serious question - do we really know what leaves or clouds are?� Are we really in possession of ultimate truth when we point to 'green leaves' or 'grey clouds' and thereupon claim additional knowledge for ourselves?� Let us confess, my readers, that these descriptions, ingenious and indispensable as they are, in no way penetrate to the essential core of things.� Let us confess to mostly being unconscious poets who manipulate representative symbols without usually realizing that a 'leaf' in no way explains exactly what a leaf is, much less a 'green leaf'.

�� And so we, too, are basically as unaware as the animals, birds, and insects as to exactly what we are living with.� We can never get to the heart of the world we have metaphorically invented, and therefore must conclude the ultimate truth of whatever confronts us in the natural world to be a refutation of our illusions rather than the illusions, or symbols, themselves.�

�� In other words, to establish anything approximate to the ultimate truth about a leaf, one would have to admit our knowledge of leaves to be relative and, hence, misleading, an attempt to describe that which, in its natural essence, defies definitive description.� In sum, there are no 'leaves'; we have conveniently invented them.� And to the extent that we have named and thereby humanized such existences, we have invented the rest of nature as well.

PARTLY OUR CREATION: What a strange moment it is in one's life when one realizes that, ultimately, there is no such thing as a 'bumblebee', indeed, that there has never been such a thing except in relation to human cognition and imagination.� The world we have created generally suffices us.� We believe quite firmly in the existence of 'bumblebees', a type of winged insect we can easily differentiate from other such insects but which, in the world beneath man, is no closer to being a 'bumblebee' than anything else.� As a named creature, it is both a truth and an illusion.� As an unnamed one, a truth through and through.� But we are of course unable to live without illusions; we must give names to things in order to be able to differentiate between them and, in doing so, fall into the trap of actually believing these named things to be ultimate realities - something they in no sense are or ever can be.

�� And so one day we realize that, together with any number of other insects, birds, animals, fish, etc., the 'bumblebee' is partly a figment of our imagination, a nameless creature which in our world acquires a fixed position but which in its own world - and doubtless in the worlds of numerous other nameless creatures - must forever remain a truthful thing-in-itself, unknowable and unnamed.�

�� With man, however, such illusions (and I use the term in the special, if unusual sense, to which it here applies) are of the greatest significance.� We need our illusions for the sake of our truths, so let us not endeavour to undermine them.� For what I have just told you is, after all, a truth acquired at the expense of an illusion.

TRUTHS BUT NO TRUTH: The fundamental reason why we can never arrive at 'the truth' about the world is that there is no single truth, i.e. human truth, but an infinity of truths which, in their various manifestations, correspond to the different life-forms contemplating them.�

�� Thus we can divide earth truths, as it were, into human, animal, reptile, bird, fish, insect, microbe, and vegetable, and then again into the 'truths' appertaining to each individual species within the overall pattern; though the 'truths' of the seven kinds of life beneath man will be correspondingly smaller and more restricted, as befits organisms with a much narrower range of knowledge.� Then, of course, one must bear in mind the possibility of diverse kinds of life existing on other planets, if not in this solar system then at least in solar systems that we presume to exist both elsewhere in the Galaxy, of which our sun is only a minor star, and in the thousand million or so other galaxies currently known to man via the world's most powerful telescopes.

�� Hence the universe of natural truths is potentially so great, diverse, and exclusive ... as to completely defy any attempt man might make to establish a categorical criterion of 'the truth' based solely on the limited and necessarily partial perspective of human cognition.� For truth, as we here understand it, is eternally relative, not absolute, and thereby confined to being a record of the human mind.

REALITY AND REALITIES: When once one has understood that there are as many worlds as separate species, one will begin to comprehend how diverse the so-called 'real world' actually is, to comprehend its diversity in terms of numerous realities, as opposed to just a single human reality compounded of specific shapes and manifestations of life.�

�� Thus one can speak, for example, in terms of cat reality, mouse reality, pigeon reality, frog reality, shark reality, wasp reality, owl reality, etc., in addition to human reality which, in its legitimate desire for world-wide integration and strict categorization of all existing phenomena, regularly overlooks the various realities confronting other creatures in order to maintain and safeguard its own perspective.

�� Finally, however, one must break the realities of the different species down into the tiny fragments which correspond to each particular life, thereby arriving at individual reality, the world within a world or, more specifically, the reality within realities.

HUMAN DIVERSITY: Training people to do individual tasks is akin to turning them into different creatures, insofar as one man becomes the rough equivalent of a horse (taxi driver), another the rough equivalent of a fox (politician); one man becomes the rough equivalent of an ox (labourer), another the rough equivalent of a chameleon (actor); one man becomes the rough equivalent of a sheepdog (foreman), another the rough equivalent of a sheep (worker); one man becomes the rough equivalent of a spider (shopkeeper), another the rough equivalent of a wasp (soldier); one man becomes the rough equivalent of an ant (builder), another the rough equivalent of a squirrel (banker), and so on.

�� As they become more like their respective tasks, so they become less like each other, the outcome ultimately being that human society comes to resemble a very subtle, if artificial, version of the animal kingdom, wherein one type of creature preys upon another to the end of its days.

NO TWO ALIKE: Might one not be correct in contending nature to be more hard-pressed to create two beings exactly alike, exactly alike, that is, in every respect, than to create four or five billion beings all different from one another?� In fact, one could conceive of eight billion, twelve billion, an infinite number of beings which nature would be in no way prepared to replicate, not even where the instances of so-called identical twins were concerned.

�� But how inexhaustible must be the human face and frame!� No two people exactly alike, not even if you took everybody that had ever lived into account!� And no two ants exactly alike, either.� What - no two ants?� But isn't that a patent exaggeration?� Don't all ants look alike?� Yes, of course they do.� But only to human eyes, to eyes that are not required to see ants as individuals but only collectively 'as ants'.�

�� As for the ants themselves, however, one might well be correct in assuming that they can differentiate between one another.� And if they can, why not sparrows, pigeons, flies, bees, and wasps?� What is there to suggest that these other species wouldn't be able to differentiate between themselves as well?�

�� But, my dear reader, you know what that implies, don't you?� No two living creatures exactly the same, neither at any time nor anywhere!� Now that really is stretching the imagination!

TIME BELONGS TO MAN: Not only does man differ from other life forms in terms of appearance, language, and custom, but also in terms of the fact that he alone lives in a given time, whereas animals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, etc., live in the timeless eternity of nature, and can therefore be said to exist negatively.

�� What, for example, can a pigeon, cat, or dog know of the minute of the hour, the hour of the day, the day of the week, the week of the month, the month of the year, the year of the century, or the century of the millennium?� There is no regulative system by which other life forms could be obliged to live in strict accordance with twentieth-century procedure, for they have no criterion which could enforce any such obligation.

�� Indeed, the fundamental ignorance of other life forms as to the establishment of a timescale permits them a degree of naturalness unknown to man, a naturalness which exists, moreover, in direct opposition to the positivity of created time.� For man, the creator of unnatural or artificial criteria, can never wholly escape his consciousness of being in a given century or of living from Sunday to Saturday in a certain month, and is thus forever obliged to live outside of natural eternity.� In a sense, the only eternity known to him is that which is granted through intense preoccupation - the transient forgetfulness of the burden of time as induced by excitement, whether physical or mental, though especially the latter.

INEVITABLY UNREASONABLE: Every man will at some time or other be shamelessly unreasonable towards some other section(s) of society in order to maintain his reasonableness where it is most required, i.e. in respect of his personal welfare.� Hence he will consciously or unconsciously adopt a superficially condemnatory view of particular people or types of persons simply because, as a human being subject to dualistic impulses, he has no other choice, since his metaphysical integrity demands that he so acts in order to remain true to himself.

�� Thus this periodic unreasonableness is, on a profounder level, a manifestation of his overall reasonableness, insofar as he respects himself as a being who must follow certain prescribed inclinations or limitations irrespective of the criticisms he may receive, in consequence of appearing unreasonable, from other differently-oriented 'reasonable' people.

PUPPETS OF LIFE: In theory, though rarely in practice, I do not condemn a man, no matter how obnoxious he may seem, for being what he is, since I cannot understand how a man with an acquired obsession - and we all acquire obsessions - can possibly be expected to act in a way contrary to the dictates of that obsession.� In other words, a man who is the inevitable consequence of a combination of former influences is in no way qualified to ignore them.

�� Thus, with regard to the individual, I do not condemn a tyrant for being a tyrant.� I may disapprove of him, but reason compels me to acknowledge tyranny, in all its manifold guises, patriarchal as well as political, petty as well as great, as a fact of (dualistic) life, one of those disagreeable facts like nightmares, earthquakes, wars, famines, and diseases, against which there seems to be no ultimate deterrent.�

�� For whatever a man does, he does because he is basically unable to do anything else.� We cannot entirely shake ourselves free from the diverse contexts and circumstances which have made us what we are.� To a large extent we are all puppets of life, ingenious marionettes who dance on the strings of our respective experiences and occupations.

THE NEGATIVE ROOT: Whatever exists naturally exists negatively, which is to say in direct opposition to a positive quality which has sprung from it, viz. silence in relation to sound, space in relation to matter, eternity in relation to time, woman in relation to man, illusion in relation to truth, barbarism in relation to culture, evil in relation to good, sadness in relation to happiness, dark in relation to light, competition in relation to co-operation, immorality in relation to morality, etc., so that whatever exists positively, by contrast, exists to a certain extent unnaturally, or by dint of a degree of effort.� Truth has to be struggled after, whereas illusion costs us no great effort, being everywhere the basic clay from which truth is moulded.� Goodness likewise has to be struggled after, whereas evil, the primal source from which all goodness springs, proves less difficult of attainment, being everywhere the more natural state-of-affairs.� And happiness, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, is not our natural condition but one to which we must daily aspire with a fresh resolve which, if successful, will temporarily free us from the gruesome clutches of that all-pervading sadness.

�� Yes, just as surely as the predominantly positive man springs from the predominantly negative and, hence, more natural woman, so do all the other positive entities known to us spring from a like-source of negativity, as though in defiance of the root substance or nature of things.� But one must not suppose this arrangement to be in any way reprehensible!� For it is only by springing from and being, as it were, enmeshed in the negative ... that man can aspire towards the positive at all.� How could it be otherwise?� One cannot have a positive base at the bottom of nature, life, and the universe, a base from which negativity sprang, for the simple reason that, properly considered, a negative attribute cannot spring from anywhere, but must always 'give birth' to a positive one.�

�� Admittedly, the world is fundamentally an evil place, but if it were not so, if it wasn't rooted in negativity, there would be no aspiration towards or attainment of the good.� Indeed, there would be no cause for the good.� Hence the intrinsic evil of the world finds redemption in man.

THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS: If one didn't have to fight for one's happiness on a daily basis, if, by some remote chance, happiness was 'handed to one on a plate', there would be little or no free choice left in the world, little or no incentive for innately happy people to do anything, so greatly would the intrinsic happiness of human existence content and preoccupy them.� It is only, however, because our natural condition is one of sadness that we are regularly goaded out of it by the desire to acquire happiness, since no man can struggle from the positive to the negative because the positive would be all-sufficing and thus unable or unwilling to instigate any such procedure.

�� Hence it is ever man's fate to struggle from the negative to the positive, from sadness to happiness, in accordance with his thoroughly admirable desire to escape from what is disagreeable.� And yet the positive can only be sustained for a limited period of time, after which it must again make way for the negative, in order that the phoenix of happiness may subsequently rise from the ashes of sadness and thereby permit man his individual freedom.� But man, as already remarked, never struggles from the positive to the negative.� On the contrary, he merely subsides or relapses into it.

WORK AND PLAY: I do not believe the man who tells me that he doesn't have any play because his play blends-in with his work and thereby forces nothing but work upon him.� To hear this is almost to be told that the man who says it doesn't really have any work either since, in the final analysis, one cannot have a life which is either all work and no play or all play and no work.� Somehow, one has to accept that one cannot work without play or play without work, even if one chooses to pretend or imagine otherwise, since one would then have forgotten what the true feelings or nature of work and play actually were.

�� No, I do not go along with the man who is or, more accurately, imagines himself to be a self-styled martyr of work without really being such.� If his play isn't completely separate from his work, then his work will ultimately be bad for him, whatever he happens to think of it.�

�� In fact, work and play are so interdependent, and yet so radically different, that, unless one keeps them apart, one will never get the most out of one's work, its being understood that there is no surer way of weakening one's impulse for work than to cut down on one's play or, as some people would have it, blend the one with the other.� For the good worker, the man whose work means more to him than just a wage, is ever the good player, the man who plays to the maximum of his ability for the sake of his work.� But if one wishes to cut down on one's play, why not cut down on one's work or, better still, give-up working altogether.

NO FREEDOM WITHOUT BONDAGE: Freedom is merely a temporary release from bondage, by no means a permanent one.� It is the negative antithesis to the positive bondage, a reprieve from that which should normally be the predominating influence in a person's life.� Without bondage there can be no freedom, without freedom no bondage.� Whether your particular bondage be in writing, painting, reading, lecturing, clerking, washing, printing, sweeping, typing, building, driving, or anything else, the essential thing is that you should be living as a freeman for the sake of your bondage rather than as a bondsman for the sake of your freedom.� For to live as a bondsman for the sake of your freedom is to live negatively, to aspire from what may be termed the negative-positive to the positive-negative, rather than from the negative to the positive as one should normally do.� After all, it isn't so much the kind of work one does ... as to how one feels about doing it that really matters.� One can live just as positively by being a clerk, a typist, a shop assistant, a car mechanic, etc., as by being an artist, a manager, a teacher, or an army officer.� It depends entirely on the type of person one is.

�� But if one is doing one thing and genuinely desires to do something else - ah! that is when one is living against the grain, living as a freeman-in-bondage rather than as a bondsman-in-freedom, and should therefore do something to alter it.� For in a predominantly positive life, a life that identifies with its work and can properly express itself through that work, the freedom acquired once one's work is finished for the day is always legitimately negative.� The individual concerned can afford, if needs be, to spend time chatting casually to various friends and/or acquaintances, or watching a rather frivolous film, or leisurely reading an inconsequential book, or going for a lengthy stroll, or just idling somewhere by himself without feeling even the slightest need to get down to some serious work, the kind of work he might otherwise feel that he really ought to be doing in order not to waste any valuable time.� But the man who cannot 'waste' any time, after his official work is over for the day, isn't living as well as he could be.� In a sense, he isn't really living at all!

FROM WINTER TO AUTUMN: If, in maintaining our established terminology, we are in accord that winter is the negative season of the year and summer, by contrast, the positive one, then I deem spring to be the negative-positive and autumn the positive-negative.� Hence we find the seasons following the sequence: negative, negative-positive, positive, positive-negative, with the two divisible seasons, viz. spring and autumn, progressing to their respective consummations in summer and winter.� Since the positive always arises from the negative, we find its earliest manifestation in spring, its consummation in summer, and its gradual decline in autumn; the winter, or root season, being the eternal negative from which the process of growth and decay must again proceed.

�� Strictly speaking, however, there are only two (not four) divisions to the year, viz. winter and summer, in accordance with the fundamental dualism underlining the activity of all life on this planet, the transitional periods, as it were, of spring and autumn being an inceptive extension of summer and winter respectively, and granting us a useful analogy with the half-light states before dawn and after sunset, which we term twilight.

NO 'MOTHER NATURE': Nature has often been referred to as 'Mother Nature', a notion which suggests a feminine or negative character when, to speak metaphorically, it is neither feminine nor masculine but a subtle combination of each.� For nature's only feminine season is the winter, whereas summer is, by way of an antithesis, distinctly masculine, and autumn and spring are a reverse combination of, in the one case, a declining masculinity and an ascending femininity and, in the other case, a declining femininity and an ascending masculinity.

�� Thus the notion of 'Mother Nature' is only valid insofar as it represents half the truth, not the whole truth.� For nature is effectively androgynous.

MALE AND FEMALE PRIDE: A beautiful woman is usually delighted by the admiring attentions of the good-looking men she happens to encounter in life.� She takes much of her pride and happiness from the fact that such men find her attractive and therefore worthy of their admiration.� Her face often betrays her self-satisfaction, the knowledge that she is desirable.� Thus her pride is direct; it is rooted in herself and requires no external props - other, of course, than the necessary or desired means of adorning her body.

�� Not so, however, with a man!� As a rule, he is not so proud of himself as a kind of 'thing-in-itself', but mostly in relation to what he represents, to the kind of work he does and the degree of respect or recognition (if any) he can expect from that.� Take away his work and you automatically deprive him of the chief means whereby he can feel admirable to himself.� His pride isn't centred, like that of an attractive woman, directly upon himself but only indirectly, through the medium of what he has achieved and continues to achieve in