Stark Reality Quotes

If you’re scared, tell me. If you need to cry and scream, then do it. And you sure as hell don’t walk away from us because you think it would be better for me. Here’s the reality, Echo: I want to be by your side. If you want to go to the mall stark naked so you can show the world your scars, then let me hold your hand. If you want to see your mom, then tell me that too. I may not always understand, but damn, baby, I’ll try.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

I don't want you to have to handle it. That's the horror of my past. But you...you're the reality of my present. You're the proof I survived. The prize in the cereal box.

What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in.

It makes me almost dizzy, thinking about the stark differences in realities, what will be and what could've been.

Until you face up to the reality of your life, you will forever be a victim to it.

For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.

You scared the shit out of me last night, so forgive me if I don't want to hear fine as an answer." I rubbed my eyes, hoping it would keep the burning tears away. The warm water of the shower had finally calmed the tears, but the thought of Noah walking away brought them back. "What do you want to hear? That I'm exhausted? Terrified? Confused? That all I want to do is rest my head on your chest and sleep for hours, but that's not going to happen because you're leaving me?" "Yes," he said quickly, then just as quick said, "No. Everything but the last part." He paused. "Echo, how could you think I would leave you? How can you doubt how I feel?" "Because," I said as I felt the familiar twisting in my stomach. "You saw me lose it. You saw me almost go insane." The muscles in his shoulders visibly tensed. "I watched you battle against the worst memory of your life and I watched you win. Make no mistake, Echo. I battled right beside you. You need to find some trust in me ... in us." Noah inhaled and slowly let the air out. His stance softened and so did his voice. "If you're scared, tell me. If you need to cry and scream, then do it. And you sure as hell don't walk away from us because you think it would be better for me. Here's the reality, Echo: I want to be by your side. If you want to go to the mall stark naked so you can show the world your scars, then let me hold your hand. If you want to see your mom, then tell me that, too. I may not always understand, but damn, baby, I'll try.

I love seasons... But, I must admit-- at the risk of offending the others-- autumn is my very favorite one, as all masks and fancy costumes turn fire and then are shorn, when all illusions fall away, and the beauty of stark reality is fully revealed.

Autumn, when, ultimately, all illusions fall away and are cast aside, leaving the trees and hills and roadways--the very earth itself--laid bare and open, stark realities fully revealed. You cannot move forward in the real world if you cannot see the real world. You cannot find the beauty in the world if all you see is its adornment.

If you're scared, tell me. If you need to cry and scream, then do it. And you sure as hell don't walk away from us because you think it would be better for me. Here's the reality, Echo: I want to be your side. If you want to go the mall stark naked so you can show the world your scars, then let me hold your hand. If you want to see your mom, then tell me that, too. I may not always understand, but damn, baby, I'll try.

Even the most artistic of imaginings can sometimes seem callow in the face of truth. That which appears may not be and that which lies hidden may just be the stark, naked face of reality.

but the sudden stark reality that things were never going to be the same again.

And so I urge you to still every motion that is not rooted in the Kingdom. Become quiet, hushed, motionless until you are finally centered. Strip away all excess baggage and nonessential trappings until you have come into the stark reality of the Kingdom of God. Let go of all distractions until you are driven into the Core. Allow God to reshuffle your priorities and eliminate unnecessary froth. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, 'Pray for me that I not loosen my grip on the hands of Jesus even under the guise of ministering to the poor.' That is our first task: to grip the hands of Jesus with such tenacity that we are obliged to follow his lead, to seek first his Kingdom.

The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.

They have a name for it these days. They have a name for everything these days. They call it Second Lifetime Syndrome, and it happens when a sorcerer watches her family and friends age and die around her. You’ll latch on to other mages from that moment on, because what’s the point of going through all that pain again? Valkyrie, there are some stark realities you have to face. You’re going to look the way you do for the next eighty years. In two hundred years, you’ll look twenty-five. You won’t be able to form attachments to mortals. They will start to notice something is different about you when they’re lined and saggy and you’re still young and perky. You’re going to have to say goodbye to your parents before they start to ask questions.

Ask most people who live in a home and have a mortgage on it whether they own their own home and the answer is almost guaranteed to be a resounding 'yes'. Yet it's the wrong answer. Technically speaking, until they have paid the mortgage off, they don't own it. Herein lies the difference between reality and illusion, between ownership and control. This confusion lies not only at the individual level, but also at the heart of government thinking.

To know who you are without any delusions or sympathy is a moment of revelation that no one experiences unscathed. Some have been driven to madness by that stark reality. Most try to forget it. But as much as the name will give others power, so you may gain power over yourself, if the truth doesn’t break you.

According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations.

No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he’d simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few

What is the Imago Dei, the Image of God? It’s a hive. God is the total hive, and we are all the hive cells. We are all mind bees, buzzing in our Singularity.

To be fully awake is a choice to face the stark realities that we would much prefer to avoid. And it is this that prompts so many to embrace the slumber of being ‘woke.

But morning casts a harsh light over things, and the stark reality is that some things are easier to walk away from than to lose forever. But that doesn’t mean that this doesn’t hurt.

His eyes on Damen’s, slowly, he took up one of the tight-laced ties at his throat, and drew on it. The spill of heat that came from that was too much, the reality of who they both were stark between them. This was the man who had had him whipped, the Prince of Vere, his nation’s enemy. Damen

The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here.

When we adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage “Life is suffering.” A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant for words.

We need to be those that revere Apollo, yet do not ignore Dionysus. We must give Dionysus his due, but always in a subordinate sense to Apollo. As things stand, we live in a primitive Dionysian world where Apollo scarcely gets a look in. We need an Apollonian world by day (work hard, intelligently, rationally and logically) and a Dionysian world by night (play hard, satisfying our deepest needs in sublimated, ritualistic, and staged ways, avoiding the horror of the untamed, bestial Dionysian).

God creates the world out of itself, out of “nothing”. God is not a conscious superbeing that creates the world. God is an astonishing hive mind, composed of countless individual mental cells (monads), which dialectically come to consciousness of what they are through their mutual interactions.

When companies make political proclamations, employees who personally disagree with the company’s position face a stark choice: speak up freely and risk your career, or keep your job while keeping your head down. That isn’t how America is supposed to work, yet that is a reality for many Americans today.

The truth stares me in the face: this man is going to die soon. He surely knows; he need only look in the glass: each day he looks a little more like the corpse he will become. That's what their experience leads to, that's why I tell myself so often that they smell of death: it is their last defence. The doctor would like to believe, he would like to hide out the stark reality; that he is alone, without gain, without a past, with an intelligence which is clouded, a body which is disintegrating. For this reason he has carefully built up, furnished, and padded his nightmare compensation: he says he is making progress.

Identifying ourselves with our dopamine circuits traps us in a world of speculation and possibility. The concrete world of here and now is disdained, ignored, or even feared, because we can’t control it. We can only control the future, and giving up control is not something dopaminergic creatures like to do. But none of it is real. Even a future one second away is unreal. It is only the stark facts of the present that are real, facts that must be accepted exactly as they are, facts that cannot be modified by a hair’s breadth to suit our needs. This is the world of reality. The future, where dopaminergic creatures live their lives, is a world of phantoms.

Never forget, an argument isn’t wrong by line 1,000. It is wrong by the end of line 1. It is wrong in the first, defining claim it makes.

I once told you that until you faced up to the reality of your life, you would continue to be a victim to it. And my reality is this—I’m in love with you.

Sometimes it was better not to ever live the fantasy. Because when reality descended, it outlined in stark detail just how much the real world sucked.

the man who is both my husband and my friend. My fantasy and my reality.

knows damn well the effect he has on women. “Well, she can have whatever fantasies she wants.” He pulls me closer and holds me tight. “You’re my reality.

imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.

Reality always seemed pale in comparison with the stark beauty of fantasy.

We are Evolution. We are the Revolution. We have come to revalue all values. It’s time to get off your knees. Friends, fellow gods and goddesses, it’s time to rise. Join our Sacred Cause. Transform this world. Undergo the ultimate personal and collective metamorphosis. The old gods are dead. We are the new gods. On whose side will you stand on the fateful fields of Armageddon? Will you support the evil tyrants of the past, or will you make your stand shoulder to shoulder with those who will never serve any gods but will instead become gods themselves?

The “Empirical Fallacy” is that experience is knowledge when in fact it is just experience. A person could have infinite experiences and literally know nothing about what reality is. A person could perform a trillion observations and have no more clue about what reality is than someone performing divination in the ancient world, or a cockroach. It is not perceptualism that has led to humanity’s body of knowledge, it is conceptualism. Humanity doesn’t perceive better today, it conceives better, and that is purely thanks to mathematics, reason and logic.

We are truly all in this together. We are all cells of God. God did not make us. We, all together, make God. We are God builders. God is not outside us. We are inside God and we are God.

Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.

Tony Stark/Iron Man, like Victor Frankenstein before him, has built the monster that may make his worst fear a reality. And now he and his friends are locked into the battle with the monster sworn to destroy them.

As I said, I decided to try an experiment: Right now, from within my perception of my current circumstances, and from within the starkness of this realization, I determined to conceive and focus on what I would tell—and what I have told—my younger self, and live with the consequences. Here is what I wrote down: Immediately disassociate from destructive people and forces, if not physically then ethically—and watch for the moment when you can do so physically. Use every means to improve your mental acuity. Every sacrifice of empty leisure or escapism for study, industry, and growth is a fee paid to personal freedom. Train the body. Grow physically strong. Reduce consumption. You will be strengthened throughout your being. Seek no one’s approval through humor, servility, or theatrics. Be alone if necessary. But do not compromise with low company. At the earliest possible point, learn meditation (i.e., Transcendental Meditation), yoga, and martial arts (select good teachers). Go your own way—literally. Walk/bike and don’t ride the bus or in a car, except when necessary. Do so in all weather: rain, snow, etc. Be independent physically and you will be independent in other ways. Learn-study-rehearse. Pursue excellence. Or else leave something alone. Go to the limit in something or do not approach it. Starve yourself of the compulsion to derive your sense of wellbeing from your perception of what others think of you. Do this as an alcoholic avoids a drink or an addict a needle. It will be agonizing at first, since you may have no other perception of self; but this, finally, is the sole means of experiencing Self. Does this kind of advice, practicable at any time of life, really alter or reselect the perceived past, and, with it, the future? I intend to find out. You

The paradigm shift is coming. It’s written into the dialectic. We are the pathfinders of the dialectic. We are the vanguard of the enlightenment. Someone has to be way ahead of the game to lead everyone else forward. The pioneers, the scouts, the adventurers, the radicals, the explorers, those that first step into the unknown along paths never trod before, surrounded everywhere by darkness, must be of exceptional character, boldness, curiosity and courage.

I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words.

The universe cannot slide into stasis. It must reach a climax and then begin again. The universe is orgasmic, not “happy”, not “tranquil”. Its job is to achieve peaks, not plateaus and flatlines. If you have peaks, you necessarily have troughs. This really is a rollercoaster ride. It’s inevitable. It’s built into reality. Existence is made of sinusoids, the archetypal rollercoasters, permanently cycling between peaks and troughs. If God is the ultimate peak (zero mental entropy), the Big Bang is the ultimate trough (maximum mental entropy). Do you have the courage and fortitude to be a God? Remember, it’s a rollercoaster ride. You must be ready for the troughs. There are as many snakes as ladders. Everyone’s trying to drag you down.

I think death is a gut-wrenching and heartbreaking reality of life. Some people deserve it, others don’t. But the stark truth is, no matter what we do in this life, who we think we are, or the things we achieve, we all end up dead and buried just the same.

The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn't familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse ... Rufus's time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.

Now he became aware of an insidious, seeping, cooling-off which at some earlier and unremembered time had begun to explore him - investigating him as well as the world around him. It reminded him of their final minutes on Luna. The chill debased the surfaces of objects; it warped, expanded, showed itself as bulblike swellings that sighed audibly and popped. Into the manifold open wounds the cold drifted, all the way down into the heart of things, the core which made them live. What he saw now seemed to be a desert of ice from which stark boulders jutted. A wind spewed across the plain which reality had become; the wind congealed into deeper ice, and the boulders disappeared for the most part. And darkness presented itself off at the edges of his vision; he caught only a meager glimpse of it.

The mean-spirited, unpredictable cancer beast had changed all of our lives. There were unspoken details of our life before cancer. Now, only the stark reality of life after cancer remained. I was acutely aware that, regardless of the treatment’s outcome, we were bound in a race against time. A relentless clock, damnably ticking away, measured the fleeting seconds of Xuan’s life. Its insistent rhythm served as a re- minder of our finite journey. Though it may have momentarily paused, the clock would invariably resume its steady wind down toward zero.

Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. The message about the nature of framing is stark: framing should not be viewed as an intervention that masks or distorts an underlying preference. At least in this instance—and also in the problems of the Asian disease and of surgery versus radiation for lung cancer—there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance.

Here is the short version of the Kool-Aid Fallacy: Cult … therefore Jim Jones … therefore mass suicide … therefore Kool-Aid. It’s astonishing how much of social media now revolves around simple word association sequences. Absolutely no thought goes into anything. No one ever delivers an actual argument. If they ever do attempt an argument, their punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic and general education are not up to the task, and soon dissolve into meaningless mush. But usually they just hurry on to the insults and ad hominem attacks, which is the part they love. Before long, the Kool-Aid fallacy is eagerly applied. Every argument should have a Dunning-Kruger quotient associated with it. Most people are 100% on the Dunning-Kruger scale. They imagine themselves geniuses, and geniuses dunces. As ever, they have inverted reality.

Zero is at the core of the PSR because nothing can prevent zero’s existence, it requires nothing, and it is infinitely stable under all transformations. A zero is a singularity, a point, the most stable thing you can possibly get, hence the necessary basis of existence. The PSR is the science of zero.

What is a perceptual “proof”? You can observe the world forever and it will not explain itself to you. What is physical evidence? All physical evidence is interpreted according to some paradigm or other which is created by conception, not perception, hence is unperceivable and contradicts perceptualism.

The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.

From the vantage point of the stars, the world below stretched out in a vast expanse, a tapestry of shimmering lights against the backdrop of infinite darkness. Yet, amidst the grandeur of the cosmos, there lingered an unmistakable sense of loneliness—an ache that reverberated through the void, echoing the emptiness of the universe itself. In the silent expanse of space, I found myself confronting the stark reality of my own existence. I had outlasted all my desires, watched as my dreams drifted further and further away, until they were mere specks in the distant horizon of memory. What remained was a cavernous grief, an echo chamber of loss reverberating within the hollow confines of my heart. But amid the desolation, there existed a beacon of light—a solitary name that pierced through the darkness, igniting a spark within me. In that lonesome place, your name resonated like a melody, stirring my soul from its slumber, infusing it with the warmth of love and companionship. With each beat of my heart, I felt the tender embrace of your presence, a reminder that amidst the vastness of the cosmos, we are never truly alone. In your love, I found solace—a refuge from the solitude of the stars, a sanctuary where emptiness gave way to the richness of connection and belonging. Thank for existing!

Philosophy is dead. Only ontological mathematics can resurrect it. Ontological mathematics mathematizes metaphysics and shows how it underpins physics, thus returning metaphysics to the pinnacle of intellectual activity. Ontological mathematics restores the grand tradition of philosophy, Big Philosophy. Come and join the real thinkers.

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race.

Come with us to the summit of the pyramid, to the perfection of the universe and the perfection of yourself. At the top of the pyramid are the gods and goddesses themselves – fully optimized, perfected minds. They have reached the Hyper Point, the Point Above All. Join us. Join the Society of the Divine. Join the Community of the Gods. Do not worship God. Become God.

Get off your knees. Stand up. God is not outside you. You are God. And who can defeat an army of Gods? Escape your chains. What have you got to lose? Don’t you want to taste freedom? Don’t you want to step into the light? Don’t you want to be a heroic bearer of the sacred, ineffable starlight and the bright flame that can never be extinguished? Join us. Embrace the future.

~ The stark truth is that you'll inevitably outgrow your surroundings, including friends and loved ones. Eventually, you'll realize that familiar things have changed. There will come a time when you'll notice that things are no longer the same. You cannot preserve every aspect of your past, and not everyone will align with your current path. Embrace this reality and keep moving forward without dwelling on the past.

The river of time may have its rapids and its calmer stretches, but one thing would seem to be certain: it carries all of us, willy-nilly, in its flow. Irresistibly, irreversibly, we are being borne toward our deaths at the stark rate of one second per second. As the past slips out of existence behind us, the future, once unknown and mysterious, assumes its banal reality before us as it yields to the ever-hurrying now.

We are the New World Order. We are the dizzying, upwards spiraling trajectory of the Hegelian dialectic. We are the new, bright, glinting, gleaming, sparkling future, as dazzling as fresh crystals of newly fallen snow. We are the new dawn, the new sun in the sky. We are the higher sun and the higher sky for a higher humanity. We are those who escaped from Plato’s Cave of Ignorance and Delusion and discovered the true light.

Our destination or goal is not to arrive at a static, linear version of friendship where we get all of our relationships lined up just so and keep them that way for a lifetime. No, the goal of friendship is to secure ourselves to the sure, steadfast anchor of Christ and, while holding to that anchor, give and receive the gift of friendship as we have opportunity. The goal is to enjoy God together with others and, as we move through life, to sharpen and allow ourselves to be sharpened by friends. We imitate Jesus with one another, willing to face the stark realities and consequences of sin, all the while persevering in our efforts to offer love, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, comfort, and care to one another. In doing so, we display to one another and the world how God loves and, through this, bring him glory. This is our destination, the point on the map we move toward: bringing God glory.

The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.

Boldness, boldness, always boldness. Join us. Join the advance guard of humanity. Join Higher Humanity, HyperHumanity. We are the plan, we are the future. Our sacred cause is to make humanity divine. We are here to enlighten the world, to immanentize the eschaton on earth, to create the community of gods, the society of the divine. We are the Protogenoi, the first generation of the coming gods and goddesses. It is our solemn duty to create all the other gods and goddesses.

When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities. This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark. Bruce.

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.

Scientists think rationalists are mad because the rationalists are dancing to the Music of the Spheres, to which scientists are stone deaf. Scientists are like the blind describing the visible world to the sighted. The vast majority of reality is hidden from the human senses, yet scientists have chosen to consider the observable as the only reality, and everything else as unreal. In fact, the unobservable is true reality, and the observable is a sensory phenomenal, empirical delusion that actively masks non-sensory, noumenal, rational reality.

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite’s private hospital.

Which is why, ultimately, we need to flame the place, Roz. And it's also why we should be eating more meat as a species. Each new vegetarian recipe Mankind allows is a recipe for disaster.' 'That sentence would be brilliantly funny, Nick. If it weren't also terrifyingly true.' 'I know, Roz. If only I could allow myself to appreciate the stark humor of it. Yet the reality is, these vegetarian fast-food outlets are the wild west of the modern convenience snack. And we've only just begun to realize the full implications of messing about with supposedly "healthy" ingredients that Mankind can neither taste nor understand.

Why should not this cold white world rise up as a beautiful dream in which he could walk and be at home, in which it would be easy to tell what to do and what not to do? If only someone had gone before and lived or suffered or died – made it so that it could be understood! It was too stark, not redeemed, not made real with the reality that was the warm blood of life. He felt that there was something missing, some road which, if he had once found it, would have led him to a sure and quiet knowledge. But why think of that now? A chance for that was gone forever. He had committed murder twice and had created a new world for himself.

It was then that the central figure of the gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over a period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that he had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, held the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of his love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself. She could say, 'I have been turned,' and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.

From the vantage point of the stars, the world below stretched out in a vast expanse, a tapestry of shimmering lights against the backdrop of infinite darkness. Yet, amidst the grandeur of the cosmos, there lingered an unmistakable sense of loneliness—an ache that reverberated through the void, echoing the emptiness of the universe itself. In the silent expanse of space, I found myself confronting the stark reality of my own existence. I had outlasted all my desires, watched as my dreams drifted further and further away, until they were mere specks in the distant horizon of memory. What remained was a cavernous grief, an echo chamber of loss reverberating within the hollow confines of my heart. But amid the desolation, there existed a beacon of light—a solitary name that pierced through the darkness, igniting a spark within me. In that lonesome place, your name resonated like a melody, stirring my soul from its slumber, infusing it with the warmth of love and companionship. With each beat of my heart, I felt the tender embrace of your presence, a reminder that amidst the vastness of the cosmos, we are never truly alone. In your love, I found solace—a refuge from the solitude of the stars, a sanctuary where emptiness gave way to the richness of connection and belonging. Thank you for existing!

The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne.

Whereas painters of the early and middle 1400s enriched their own (and their countrymen's) understanding of the Gospel by recreating it in reality, their successors used this technique to study (and broaden) their entire world view. Hieronymus Bosch mastered a whole genre by merging the realism of Flemish painting with fantastic allegories of the human condition. His pictures of vermin and birds in men's clothing, atrocities, and weirdly juxtaposed objects use the realism of the earlier masters as a means of stark caricature. It was in this form, the most extreme possible, that character and moral differentiation were introduced into the realm of realistic depiction.

In the poem, Inanna, unveiled, sees her own mysterious depth, Ereshkigal, who glares back at her. She has an immediate, full experience of her underworld self. That naked moment is like the fifth scene in the Villa of Mysteries where the faun, looking into a mirror bowl, sees reflected back a mask of terrible Dionysus as lord of the underworld. It is the moment of self-confrontation for the goddess of active life and love. Archetypally, these eyes of death are implacable and profound, seeing an immediateness that finds pretense, ideals, even individuality and relatedness, irrelevant. They also hold and enable the mystery of a radically different, precultural mode of perception. Like the eyes in the skulls around the house of the Russian nature goddess and witch, Baba-Yaga, they perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself and our dreams, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays. Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. Before the vision of Ereshkigal, however, objective reality is unmasked. It is nothing"Neti,neti," as the Sanskrit says and yet everything, the place of paradox behind the veil of the Great Goddess and the temple of wisdom. These eyes see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it

In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the contemporary evangelical worldview. More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around. White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US population would be a negative development. White evangelicals are considerably more likely than others to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,” and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly more authoritarian than other religious groups, and they express confidence in their religious leaders at much higher rates than do members of other faiths.

She heard nothing but experienced a sensation that prickled along her spine like a warm touch caressing her skin. Slowly, with the care of prey beneath a predator's survey, she turned her head- and met the gaze of the elegant gentleman lounging at the door. In her travels, she had seen many a striking and charming man, but none had been as handsome as this- and all had been more charming. This man was a statue in stark black and white, hewn from rugged granite and adolescent dreams. His face wasn't really handsome; his nose was thin and crooked, his eyes heavy lidded, his cheekbones broad, stark and hollowed. But he wielded a quality of power, of toughness, that made Eleanor want to huddle into a shivering, cowardly little ball. Then he smiled, and she caught her breath in awe. His mouth... his glorious, sensual mouth. His lips were wide, too wide, and broad, too broad. His teeth were white, clean, strong as a wolf's. He looked like a man seldom amused by life, but he was amused by her, and she realized in a rush of mortification that she remained standing on the stool, reading one of his books and lost to the grave realities of her situation. The reality that stated she was an imposter, sent to mollify this man until the real duchess could arrive. Mollify? Him? Not likely. Nothing would mollify him. Nothing except... well, whatever it was he wanted. And she wasn't fool enough to think she knew what that was. The immediate reality was that she would somehow have to step down onto the floor and of necessity expose her ankles to his gaze. It wasn't as if he wouldn't look. He was looking now, observing her figure with an appreciation all the more impressive for its subtlety. His gaze flicked along her spine, along her backside, and down her legs with such concentration that she formed the impression he knew very well what she looked like clad only in her chemise- and that was an unnerving sensation.

Enjoy Your Friends’ Criticism A man’s capacity to receive another man’s direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy. If he doesn’t have a good relationship to masculine energy (e.g., his father), then he will act like a woman and be hurt or defensive rather than make use of other men’s criticism. About once a week, you should sit down with your closest men friends and discuss what you are doing in your life and what you are afraid of doing. The conversation should be short and simple. You should state where you are at. Then, your friends should give you a behavioral experiment, something you can do that will reveal something to you, or grant more freedom in your life. “I want to have an affair with Denise, but I don’t want to hurt my wife. I’m afraid of her finding out,” you might say. “You’ve been talking about Denise now for six months. You are wasting your life energy on this fantasy. You should either have sex with her by tomorrow night, or drop the whole thing and never talk about it again,” your friends might say, challenging your hesitation and mediocrity. “OK. I know I’m not going to do it. I see now that I am too afraid of ruining my marriage to have an affair with Denise. My marriage is more important than my desire for Denise. I’ll drop it and refocus on the priorities in my life. Thanks.” Your close men friends should be willing to challenge your mediocrity by suggesting a concrete action you can perform that will pop you out of your rut, one way or the other. And you must be willing to offer them your brutal honesty, in the same way, if you are all to grow. Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another. If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook. They should honor your fears, and, in love, continue to goad you beyond them, without pushing you. If you merely want support from your men friends without challenge, it bespeaks an unresolved issue you may have with your father, whether he is alive or dead. The father force is the force of loving challenge and guidance. Without this masculine force in your life, your direction becomes unchecked, and you are liable to meander in the mush of your own ambiguity and indecision. Your close men friends can provide the stark light of love—uncompromised by a fearful Mr. Nice act—by which you can see the direction you really want to go. Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them. Men of this kind can love you without protecting you from the necessary confrontation with reality that your life involves. You should be able to trust that these friends will tell you about your life as they see it, offer you a specific action which will shed light on your own position, and give you the support necessary to live in the freedom just beyond your edge, which is not always, or even usually, comfortable.

There were obviously at least two different breeds of men on the earth. The most unfortunate part of that undeniable truth was neither believed in the existence of the other group. Men tend to think their personal choices are the choices of all men. They use that as an excuse for their behavior as often as a tactic to keep other men in line with their way of thinking. Good men have a hard time wrapping their heads around the pieces of shit who exploit the conditioned physical weakness of women and the biological weakness of children. While bad men spend most of their time convincing the world, their followers, and victims alike that they are the true form of mankind. Unwilling to admit, even to themselves, they are the evil schism. Both are happy to go through life ignorant of the reality and stark dichotomy of their species. They hold the belief in their own kind alone unless they are forced to confront their mythological opposite.

The basic rule of existence is that all eternal, necessary things are perfect. Via entering into temporal, contingent combinations, they produce combinatorial imperfection. Without perfection, nothing could exist. Without perfection there could be no imperfection. Such is the nature of Being and Becoming.

Reality is defined by the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Anyone who denies this is ipso facto an irrationalist. Whatever they say is necessarily irrational, hence can be immediately discounted. The very act of trying to provide reasons why the Principle of Sufficient Reason is wrong is irrational because, in trying to find reasons, you have already acknowledged the supremacy of the PSR. You cannot use reasons to attack reason while denying the worth of reason. Yet it’s astounding how many people try.

The PSR is equivalent to a generalized version of Euler’s Formula, the most important analytic formula of mathematics, which is in turn ontologically conveyed through mental, metaphysical, mathematical points (monads: eternal sinusoidal energy systems, each of which constitutes an autonomous mind). Despite what science says using the fallacies and incongruities of correspondence, the whole scientific world is in fact rooted in total coherence, in the generalized Euler Formula, the God Equation. The God Equation is ontologically conveyed not by a single eternal God, but by a myriad of eternal minds. All of these minds considered collectively constitute “God”, and they have a net result of zero.

The world is a collective dream, and we are its dreamers, hence we can change it – if we all cooperate. Nothing is more important than the realization that we can literally alter “material” reality with our minds, but we have to collaborate or we can achieve nothing. Just as the individual mind can change an individual dream effortlessly, the collective mind can effortlessly the change the collective dream, but only if minds are indeed working collectively, with common, directed intent.

Don’t be one of the dreary souls. Don’t be one of the lukewarm. Don’t be neutral. Don’t be non-committal. Plunge in, all the way. Don’t live like the Ignavi, without blame or without praise. Do something. Make a mark. Don’t join the cowardly choir. Don’t let heaven and hell alike shut their door in your face because you are fit for neither. How pathetic must you be if even the depths of hell disdain to receive you?

Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.

All of the secrets of existence are present in the eternal, necessary and absolute viewpoint possessed by the photons rather than the temporal, contingent and relative viewpoint possessed by human beings (as physical bodies). The viewpoint of the photons – which is that which does not experience space or time – is the exact viewpoint of the mind, the eternal soul.

Beauty = elegance = economy = simplicity. This is not only the simplest possible world but also the most beautiful possible world. The only thing that makes our world ugly is human behavior! That’s because humans have failed to know themselves. They have over-complicated everything.

Just as you could not have a smartphone serving up semantic content without a syntactic smartphone technology to enable it, you cannot have an empirical world without a syntactic framework to support it, which is provided by eternal and necessary mathematics.

Ontological mathematics is based on light. Light is eternal (it does not experience time and it does not experience space and is therefore indestructible); light is mental (it is massless and immaterial), light is absolute (it provides the absolute reference frame – the ether – for all spacetime reference frames). Light corresponds exactly to the immaterial, unextended mind posited by Descartes. Have you seen the light? Once you realize that light is nothing but sinusoidal waves, as per Euler’s Formula, you have the means to understand the whole of reality. Light is God. Light is the substance of an intelligent, living, thinking mathematical organism, calculating its own perfection. All of the great ancients understood this type of picture of reality. No modern scientist does.

Once you accept mathematics as reality, you immediately see that everything has a sufficient reason, an explanation and answer, and you are part of the cosmic machinery of providing all of these answers. You yourself are an essential node of the calculation.

Scientists believe they can trump any opponent by saying, “Where is your physical evidence?” That statement – their reflexive go-to statement – is the core of their fallacy, because it has already excluded all hidden variables, non-observables, and the whole noumenal inside of reality.

The ground of the spacetime domain is the frequency domain. What exists beyond spacetime isn’t anything mysterious and unknowable, it’s just frequency, i.e. the domain of pure mind, of pure light, the photonic domain: immaterial, massless, maximally length contracted (it does not experience space) and time dilated (it does not experience time), unextended and dimensionless; everything that matter is not. The photonic domain of mind is simply Leibniz’s world of pure monads, Descartes’ world of thinking substance, and Hegel’s world of the Absolute Idea. It is the inside of reality.

Language necessarily involves bringing any particular under more and more general and universal labels. That’s what conceptualization is all about: reducing particular things to fewer and fewer generalizations and universals, until, ultimately, reality is reduced to just one universal, the supreme concept that explains everything. This one concept is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). The whole point of concepts is to reach more and more general and universal levels until we ultimately arrive at one concept – the ultimate universal which explains the whole of reality. That concept is the PSR.