Unreal Experience Quotes

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

Sometimes I just wanted to…I don’t know, escape life. To delve headfirst into a world that dealt with real-life issues to open my eyes, or a world that was something else, something completely unreal. One with warring faes or roaming vampire clans. I wanted to experience new things and always, always, read the last page feeling satisfied. Because sometimes happily-ever-after existed only in the books I read.

Louise often feels like part of her is "acting." At the same time , "there is another part 'inside' that is not connecting with the me that is talking to you," she says. When the depersonalization is at its most intense, she feels like she just doesn't exist. These experiences leave her confused about who she really is, and quite often, she feels like an "actress" or simply, "a fake.

As long as man is overpowered by the darkness of ignorance, he is the slave of Nature and must accept whatever comes as the fruit of his thoughts and deeds. When he strays into the path of unreality, the Sages declare that he destroys himself; because he who clings to the perishable body and regards it as his true Self must experience death many times.

in the universal womb that is boundless space all forms of matter and energy occur as flux of the four elements, but all are empty forms, absent in reality: all phenomena, arising in pure mind, are like that. just as dream is a part of sleep, unreal in its arising, so all and everything is pure mind, never separated from it, and without substance or attribute. experience is neither mind nor anything but mind; it is a vivid display of emptiness, like magical illusion, in the very moment inconceivable and unutterable. all experience arising in the mind, at its inception, know it as emptiness!

War brings out the worst and the best in people. Wars do not make men great, but they do bring out the greatness in good men. War is romantic only to those who are far away from the sounds and turmoil of battle. For those of us who served in Easy Company, and for those who served their country in other theaters, we came back as better men and women as a result of being in combat, and most would do it again if called upon. But each of us hoped that if we had learned anything from the experience it is that war is unreal, and we earnestly hoped that it would never happen again.

Once someone is an unreal other, we lose sight of how they hurt. Because we don’t experience them as feeling beings, we not only ignore them, we can inflict pain on them without compunction. Not

Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory.

Respecting things that are difficult to measure, rather than dismissing them as unreal, is not rejecting science. It’s embracing science.

Reality is an easy commodity in the Front Range. There's weather, and there are animals that are thinking about eating you, and there's all that beauty. It sort of whomps you on the head. It's strange that we use the word "unreal" to describe beauty-it's my experience that beauty drags us by the hair into the real.

am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed…

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.

They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.

For what is a disciple? He is one who seeks to learn a new rhythm, to enter a new field of experience, and to follow the steps of that advanced humanity who have trodden ahead of him the path, leading from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real.

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.

It is lonely behind these boundaries. Some people-particularly those whom psychiatrists call schizoid-because of unpleasant, traumatizing experiences in childhood, perceive the world outside of themselves as unredeemably dangerous, hostile, confusing and unnurturing. Such people feel their boundaries to be protecting and comforting and find a sense of safety in their loneliness. But most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escapetemporarily. The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more! In some respects (but certainly not in all) the act of falling in love is an act of regression. The experience of merging with the loved one has in it echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy. Along with the merging we also reexperience the sense of omnipotence which we had to give up in our journey out of childhood. All things seem possible! United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all obstacles. We believe that the strength of our love will cause the forces of opposition to bow down in submission and melt away into the darkness. All problems will be overcome. The future will be all light. The unreality of these feelings when we have fallen in love is essentially the same as the unreality of the two-year-old who feels itself to be king of the family and the world with power unlimited. Just as reality intrudes upon the two-year-old's fantasy of omnipotence so does reality intrude upon the fantastic unity of the couple who have fallen in love. Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself. He wants to have sex; she doesn't. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn't. He wants to put money in the bank; she wants a dishwasher. She wants to talk about her job; he wants to talk about his. She doesn't like his friends; he doesn't like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other's. One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place; gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals. At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.

It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

But unlike people with psychotic conditions like schizophrenia, they are not going insane at all. They are, if anything, suddenly overly aware of reality and existence and of the ways in which their own experience is a distortion of a “normal” sense of a real self. Depersonalization,

Plato once said that pain restores order to the soul. Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference. “The throbbing vein / will take you further / than any thinking.”14 Whatever else it does, pain offers an experience of being human that is as elemental as birth, orgasm, love, and death. Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality—not the medicine you would have chosen, perhaps, but an effective one all the same. The next time you are in real pain, see how you feel about television shows, new appliances, a clean house, or your resumé. Chances are that none of these will do anything for you. All that will do anything for you is some cool water, held out by someone who has stopped everything else in order to look after you. An extra blanket might also help, a dry pillow, the simple knowledge that there is someone in the house who might hear you if you cried.

I’d always been a reader and I read a lot, usually sticking to books with some sort of romantic theme and a classic happily-ever-after. Lori used to make fun of me nonstop for it, claiming I had cheesy taste in books, but whatever. At least I didn’t have pretentious taste in books like she did, and sometimes I just wanted to...I don’t know, escape life. To delve headfirst into a world that dealt with real-life issues to open my eyes, or a world that was something else, something completely unreal. One with warring faes or roaming vampire clans. I wanted to experience new things and always, always, reach the last page feeling satisfied. Because sometimes happily-ever-after existed only in the books I read.

I don't have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn't do it with words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non-dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality—or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it—which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off. There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories—it's always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion. In a sense, what's happening now in films and in popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of rationalism. One wants to break out of the clearly arguable, demonstrable things which really are not very meaningful, or very useful or inspiring, nor does one even sense any enormous truth in them.

What's wrong with actors?" "They quote poetry. A girl has to be crazy to believe one," I told him. "It's far too easy for an actor to give you a good line." "You're quick to judge." "No," I argued. "I've had experience with theater types. After a while they can't tell real from unreal. They believe their own creation of themselves and can't understand why everyone else isn't convinced they're wonderful." He jumped down from the limb, then stared up at me, his eyes sparking with anger. "It's efficient, I guess, judging an individual by a group. You don't waste any time trying to know somebody." But I don't want to know you! I thought as I watched Mike walk away. I can't risk knowing you.

I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’ Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something.

One day about a month ago, I really hit bottom. You know, I just felt that in a Godless universe, I didn't want to go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle, which I loaded, believe it or not, and pressed it to my forehead. And I remember thinking, at the time, I'm gonna kill myself. Then I thought, what if I'm wrong? What if there is a God? I mean, after all, nobody really knows that. But then I thought, no, you know, maybe is not good enough. I want certainty or nothing. And I remember very clearly, the clock was ticking, and I was sitting there frozen with the gun to my head, debating whether to shoot. [The gun fires accidentally, shattering a mirror] All of a sudden, the gun went off. I had been so tense my finger had squeezed the trigger inadvertently. But I was perspiring so much the gun had slid off my forehead and missed me. And suddenly neighbors were, were pounding on the door, and, and I don't know, the whole scene was just pandemonium. And, uh, you know, I-I-I ran to the door, I-I didn't know what to say. You know, I was-I was embarrassed and confused and my-my-my mind was r-r-racing a mile a minute. And I-I just knew one thing. I-I-I had to get out of that house, I had to just get out in the fresh air and-and clear my head. And I remember very clearly, I walked the streets. I walked and I walked. I-I didn't know what was going through my mind. It all seemed so violent and un-unreal to me. And I wandered for a long time on the Upper West Side, you know, and-and it must have been hours. You know, my-my feet hurt, my head was-was pounding, and-and I had to sit down. I went into a movie house. I-I didn't know what was playing or anything. I just, I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and, and be logical and put the world back into rational perspective. And I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down, and, you know, the movie was a-a-a film that I'd seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and-and I always, uh, loved it. And, you know, I'm-I'm watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film, you know. And I started to feel, how can you even think of killing yourself. I mean isn't it so stupid? I mean, l-look at all the people up there on the screen. You know, they're real funny, and-and what if the worst is true. What if there's no God, and you only go around once and that's it. Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience? You know, what the hell, it's-it's not all a drag. And I'm thinkin' to myself, geez, I should stop ruining my life - searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And, you know, after, who knows? I mean, you know, maybe there is something. Nobody really knows. I know, I know maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that's the best we have. And then, I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt. ....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street.

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall. Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.

The word suffer in its original sense means “to allow,” such as in one of Shakespeare’s dramas when a courtier says, “I suffer you to speak before the king.” So to suffer creatively is simply to allow what is, to stop fighting it, and instead to affirm your life. Creative suffering is allowing what is and saying “yes!” Such experience is redemptive in that it leads to healing and self-knowledge. If you can honestly assess what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, you are getting closer to enlightenment, as your escape mechanism is diminished. By stating what is at any moment, with complete honesty and sincerity, you become conscious of it. When

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality.

All those who experience the gross world as real are asleep. Only those who experience it as unreal can realise God and become awakened.

The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience.

The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience.

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me … I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home…

She had never had any experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality;

Love of God is not a thing which we produce in ourselves by excessive brooding or by self-hypnotism or by any other method. It is a permanent flame, slowly burning in the caverns of all our hearts. […] The basis of all religions is this love of God. For if this love of God were not vital to us, all that the great prophets have been trying to preach would have been unreal and futile. If it were not a real experience which in some sense is shared by us all, an experience which ennobles us and raises us far above the selfish pettinesses of life, no prophet and no religious deed would be able to appeal to our higher natures and establish the claims of religion.

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.

Codependents confuse caretaking and sacrifice with loyalty and love. Although they are proud of their unwavering dedication to the person they love, they end up feeling unappreciated and used. Codependents yearn to be loved, but because of their choice of dance partner, find their dreams unrealized. With the heartbreak of unfulfilled dreams, codependents silently and bitterly swallow their unhappiness. Codependents are essentially stuck in a pattern of giving and sacrificing, without the possibility of ever receiving the same from their partner. They pretend to enjoy the dance, but secretly harbor feelings of anger, bitterness, and sadness for not taking a more active role in their dance experience. They are convinced they will never find a dance partner who will love them for who they are, as opposed to what they can do for them. Their low self-esteem and pessimism manifests as a form of learned helplessness that ultimately keeps them on the dance floor with their narcissistic partner.

First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them forever after. And now this same tropic opiate fills my lungs and heart and awakens memories of things which have never happened and foretelling things which will never be. Experiences of great intensity - a special dream, a period of concentrated work, maybe a love affair - have in common that they are unusually real while they last. Yet it is precisely this quality which so easily vanishes. Afterwards, how unreal it all suddenly seems!

Regarding life, it is much the best to think that the experiences we have are necessary for us. It is by means of experience that we develop and not through our imagination. Imagination is nothing. Explanation is nothing. One can only experience and somehow describe--with, in Camus's phrase, lucid indifference. At the same time, experience is fundamentally illusory. When one is experiencing emotional pain or grief, one feels that everything that happens in life is unreal. And this is a right understanding of life.

Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages; one even made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner. Her own case, of course, would be different.

Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal. Such worship or prayer is no flight of eloquence; it is no lip-homage.

Of course, the diagnosis of PTSD was only itself introduced into psychiatry in 1980. At first, it was seen as something rare, a condition that only affected a minority of soldiers who had been devastated by combat experiences. But soon the same kinds of symptoms—intrusive thoughts about the traumatic event, flashbacks, disrupted sleep, a sense of unreality, a heightened startle response, extreme anxiety—began to be described in rape survivors, victims of natural disaster and people who’d had or witnessed life-threatening accidents or injuries. Now the condition is believed to affect at least 7 percent of all Americans and most people are familiar with the idea that trauma can have profound and lasting effects. From the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we recognize that catastrophic events can leave indelible marks on the mind.

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

We all know the experience at the moving pictures when we are ushered to a seat very far off-center. At first the screen and what is on it look so distorted and unreal we feel like leaving. But in a few minutes we have learned to take our position into account, and the proportions right themselves. And as with shapes, so with colors.

We filter what we observe and tend to explain away or ignore anything that doesn’t conform with what’s already in our worldviews. We interpret what we observe based on the assumptions and presuppositions that come out of our worldviews. If an observation or experience conflicts with our worldviews, we think it’s insane, unreal, or evil.

Whatever reality is there - and you can see most of your realities as the result of your choices - you can make a glorious experience, or you can be victimized by not tuning in, and by judging it in unreal terms. Think of the logic here. How foolish ever to allow yourself to be upset or immobilized over things when your upset will do nothing.

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence," "teeming desert," are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. "He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.. . . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat."[277] [277] H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence. These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

All groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason, for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities? The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as ‘reality’. However, ‘reality’ in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality. If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or insecurity, identity or lack of identity. A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy unrecognized as such. If [someone] begins to wake up from the [group] phantasy system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by [that group] since to them their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real.

Our aim must be to help our patient to achieve the highest possible activation of his life, to lead him, so to speak, from the state of a “pattens” to that of an “agens.” With this in view we must not only lead him to experience his existence as a constant effort to actualize values. We must also show him that the task he is responsible for is always a specific task. It is specific in a twin sense: one, that the task varies from person to person—in accord with the uniqueness of each person. Two, that it changes from hour to hour, in accord with the singularity of every situation. We need only remind ourselves of what Scheler has called “situational values” in contrast to the “eternal” values which are valid at all times and for everyone. In a sense these situational values are always there, waiting until their hour strikes and a man seizes the single opportunity to actualize them. If that opportunity is missed, they are irrevocably lost; the situational value remains forever unrealized. The man has missed out on it.

During this hour in the waking streets I felt at ease, at peace; my body, which I despised, operated like a machine. I was spaced out, the catchphrase my friends at school used to describe their first experiments with marijuana and booze. This buzzword perfectly described a picture in my mind of me, Alice, hovering just below the ceiling like a balloon and looking down at my own small bed where a big man lay heavily on a little girl I couldn’t quite see or recognize. It wasn’t me. I was spaced out on the ceiling. I had that same spacey feeling when I cooked for my father, which I still did, though less often. I made omelettes, of course. I cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl, and as I reached for the butter dish, I always had an odd sensation in my hands and arms. My fingers prickled; it didn’t feel like me but someone else cutting off a great chunk of greasy butter and putting it into the pan. I’d add a large amount of salt — I knew what it did to your blood pressure, and I mumbled curses as I whisked the brew. When I poured the slop into the hot butter and shuffled the frying pan over the burner, it didn’t look like my hand holding the frying-pan handle and I am sure it was someone else’s eyes that watched the eggs bubble and brown. As I dropped two slices of wholemeal bread in the toaster, I would observe myself as if from across the room and, with tingling hands gripping the spatula, folded the omelette so it looked like an apple envelope. My alien hands would flip the omelette on to a plate and I’d spread the remainder of the butter on the toast when the two slices of bread leapt from the toaster. ‘Delicious,’ he’d say, commenting on the food before even trying it.

The person who experiences disruption of bonding recoils and withdraws emotionally. He does not experience his need, the hunger for love. Instead, he buries his needs deep inside, so he can no longer be hurt. This withdrawal is called defensive devaluation. Defensive devaluation is a protective device that makes love bad, trust unimportant, and people “no darn good” anyway. People who have been deeply hurt in their relationships will often devalue love so it doesn’t hurt so much. And they often become resigned to never loving again. People who are unbonded do funny things in relationships: They don’t look for safe people: there’s no hunger. They don’t recognize safe people: no one is safe. They don’t reach out to safe people: why get hurt again? Although unbonded people often have friends and families, their isolation is deep and can cause many serious problems. A person who cannot bond may suffer from addictions, depression, emptiness, excessive caretaking, fear of being treated like an object, fears of closeness, feelings of guilt, feelings of unreality, idealism, lack of joy, loss of meaning, negative bonds, outbursts of anger, panic, shallow relationships, or thought problems such as confusion, distorted thinking, and irrational fears.

It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.

God is ever busy in freeing you from the tangle of worldly friendship and attachments which are in their very nature unstable and unreliable, and, therefore, bring you nothing but sorrows and anxieties. Let this experience teach you that if there is one whom you can entirely trust and for whom you should offer the love of an undivided heart, it should be the supreme Lord Himself who has His eternal seat in your heart. God is all merciful. Pray to Him. '0 God, lead me from the unreal to the Real; from darkness to Light; from death to Immortality.' When He makes you pass through many a painful ordeal of life, it is only to awaken you to the ultimate Reality.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train. And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge — movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition. His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now? I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then? The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza’s inbrooding and Gant’s expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.

counterfactual emotions,” or the feelings that spurred people’s minds to spin alternative realities in order to avoid the pain of the emotion. Regret was the most obvious counterfactual emotion, but frustration and envy shared regret’s essential trait. “The emotions of unrealized possibility,” Danny called them, in a letter to Amos. These emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity, Danny wrote, was a product of two variables: “the desirability of the alternative” and “the possibility of the alternative.” Experiences that led to regret and frustration were not always easy to undo. Frustrated people needed to undo some feature of their environment, while regretful people needed to undo their own actions. “The basic rules of undoing, however, apply alike to frustration and regret,” he wrote. “They require a more or less plausible path leading to the alternative state.” Envy was different. Envy did not require a person to exert the slightest effort to imagine a path to the alternative state. “The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.” Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination. Danny spent the

Whatever we experience in a dream appears to us to be real only so long as we are experiencing that dream. When we wake up and consider what we had experienced, we understand clearly and without any doubt that it was all unreal, being merely a figment of our imagination. Likewise, all that we experience in this so-called waking state appears to us to be real only so long as we are experiencing this state. When we wake up into our real waking state, which is the non-dual state of perfectly clear self-consciousness or self-knowledge, we will discover that all the duality that we are now experiencing in our present state of self-ignorance is as unreal as all the duality that we experienced in our dream, being nothing but a mere figment of our own imagination.

When I think about my own human experience, what honest people have told me about their human experiences, and the experiences of every historical and contemporary human being I've ever studied, we all seem to function in the exact same way. We hurt people, and we are hurt by people. We feel left out, envious, not good enough, sick, and tied. We have unrealized dreams and deep regrets. We are certain that we were meant for more and that we don't even deserve what we have. We feel ecstatic and then numb. We wish our parents had done better by us. We wish we could do better by our children. We betray and we are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to. We say good-bye to animals, to places, to people we cannot live without. We are so afraid of dying. Also: of living. We have fallen in love and out of love, and people have fallen in love and out of love with us. We wonder if what happened to us that night will mean we can never be touched again without fear. We live with rage bubbling. We are sweaty, bloated, gassy, oily. We love our children, we long for children, we do not want children. We are at war with our bodies, our minds, our souls. We are at war with one another. We wish we’d said all those things while they were still here. They’re still here, and we’re still not saying those things. We know we won’t. We don’t understand ourselves. We don’t understand why we hurt those we love. We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don’t understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

Francis Spufford, using very contemporary idiom, calls for the same thing in this way. When discussing our sinfulness, he says: What we’re talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It’s our active inclination to break stuff, “stuff” here including . . . promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people’s. . . . [You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time. You’re equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings. . . . You’re human, and that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience.180 Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls “unreality.

After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.

By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. Natural narcissism-the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you-is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader's power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak. No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don't they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?-men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they "constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real." And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural causa-sui? The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it. It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn't censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.

Of course, the diagnosis of PTSD was only itself introduced into psychiatry in 1980. At first, it was seen as something rare, a condition that only affected a minority of soldiers who had been devastated by combat experiences. But soon the same kinds of symptoms—intrusive thoughts about the traumatic event, flashbacks, disrupted sleep, a sense of unreality, a heightened startle response, extreme anxiety—began to be described in rape survivors, victims of natural disaster, and people who’d had or witnessed life-threatening accidents or injuries. Now the condition is believed to affect at least 7 percent of all Americans and most people are familiar with the idea that trauma can have profound and lasting effects. From the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we recognize that catastrophic events can leave indelible marks on the mind. We know now—as my research and that of so many others has ultimately shown—that the impact is actually far greater on children than it is on adults.

While irrational faith is rooted in submission to a power which is felt to be overwhelmingly strong, omniscient and omnipotent, and in the abdication of one's own power and strength, rational faith is based upon the opposite experience. We have this faith in a thought because it is the result of our own observation and thinking. We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love. The basis of rational faith is productiveness; to live by our faith means to live productively. It follows that the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power. There is submission to it or, on the part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements. Because of the fact that faith and power are mutually exclusive, all religions and political systems which originally are built on rational faith become corrupt and eventually lose what strength they have, if they rely on power or ally themselves with it. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.

Is the cinema screen affected by a scene of fire burning or sea rising? So it is with the Self. The idea that I am the body or the mind is so deeply ingrained that one cannot get over it, even if convinced otherwise. One experiences a dream and knows it to be unreal on waking. Waking experience is unreal in other states. So each state contradicts the others. They are therefore mere changes taking place in the seer, or phenomena appearing in the Self, which is unbroken and remains unaffected by them. Just as the waking, dream and sleep states are phenomena, so also birth, growth and death are phenomena in the Self, which continues to be unbroken and unaffected. Birth and death are only ideas. They pertain to the body or the mind. The Self exists before the birth of this body and will remain after the death of this body. So it is with the series of bodies taken up in succession. The Self is immortal. The phenomena are changeful and appear mortal. The fear of death is of the body. It is not true of the Self. Such fear is due to ignorance. Realization means True Knowledge of the Perfection and Immortality of the Self. Mortality is only an idea and cause of misery. You get rid of it by realizing the Immortal nature of the Self. (p. 386)

WE ARE THE ONLY TRUE MEDIUMS We the carriers of memory We the conductors and receivers We the stars and suns on earth We the databases of consciousness We the un-system, we the rhythm We the message We the book that’s being written Read spoken and translated Connected across generations with everything living Like planets and seashells in an infinite spiral Where you can’t isolate nothing Where the text is an experience Where borders can’t even be drawn Where lines can’t be drawn because the spiral lasts forever Where the concepts of borders, scripts, divisions, mine, yours The isolation of orthodox science fails Falls We are the true countries We the quantum ur-power stations of nature We the most perfect, most developed technology on Earth Before taxes and birth certificates of fictions This text are the bodies of your ∞ being This text is your body We the transmitters We the books of life The living song Transferrable Open Non-privatizable We the hearts of the earth We the pulse and beat and the harmony of bodies Against the cogs of antediluvian wheels We the trans-national We the divided We the displaced The self-deported and driven further Erased but devious Pagans deported on sunlight and wind Unrealized partisans Wet from the struggle and the fear of lies Of revolutions Whose rotation’s Currency is blood The wealth of nations we are The treasures The brokers of sources of inexhaustible energies Unbuyable Non-privatizable Immortal Because alive We the transmitters We the books of life The living song Transmittable Open Non-privatizable

Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”10 Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps most clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon. Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence”—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive . . . or of dying without pain. Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted, though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being hurt or feels trapped in the relationship or is otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival. Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive. But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.

The Universe we know of is a very sophisticated system where everything that we see and experience is completely relative and reality is absolutely unreal and differs from one observer to another. This is where the word ‘absolute’ becomes absurd with time and space in its play.

Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die. Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. "The fortunate fall" as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience.

CHIEF AMONG THE emotions suppressed (or repressed or disassociated) in our childhood but stored in the cells of our bodies is fear. A child who has been beaten must constantly fear new blows, but it cannot live with the knowledge that it has been cruelly treated. Similarly, a neglected child cannot consciously experience its own pain, let alone express it, for fear of being abandoned entirely. So the child remains trapped in an unreal, rose-tinted, illusory world. That world helps it to survive.

MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic: Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think

He always walked home now. It would not have occurred to him to make an excuse for this stratagem, which was one of delay, and yet he could not bring himself to give the true reason for it. Tissy had ceased complaining; he sensed a withdrawal in her. Her earlier timidity had hardened into a kind of refusal to engage which was in fact a sign of strength rather than weakness. Her silences were loaded with criticism, yet they were maintained as silences, and they became more eloquent than the words they suppressed. There was no open disagreement between them. Their routines were so established that they moved with an automatic accord through their daily lives. Sometimes it seemed to Lewis that their value to each other was as a foil for what was essentially an individual experience of solitude, which, borne alone, might strike either one of them down with intolerable perplexity: with the other there neither could feel totally abandoned. Yet for each of them a peculiar loneliness was an older, perhaps a more natural experience than companionship, and perhaps there was a recognition of the inevitable, even a rapture, in succumbing once again to this experience, which was felt to be archaic, predestined. Down they sank, through all the pretences, through the eager assumption of otherness that each had sought in marriage, down to that original feeling of unreality, unfamiliarity, with which they had first embraced the world. With this, a recognition of strangeness between them, as if each were puzzled by the continued presence of the other. From time to time there was a coming together; afterwards they took leave of each other, like partners at the end of a dance.

Barbelo's curiosity and fascination to experiment and experience death through subconciously entering the Mindplant vacationers minds whilst she executed the bodies they inhibited, had created consequential dilemna's and obstacles she'd had to overcome. Relief settled her mind as she savoured the taste of victory. Her desires and her work had prevailed and could continue. The lifeforce of the Mindplant program had not been extinguished and had been successfully salvaged from the claws of it's adversity's. She embraced the thought of the future and all the unrealized opportunities it presented. Opportunities for her, the Mindplant program and the continuation of her journey towards breaking the limitations of scientific knowledge and boundaries.

He continued probing within himself to experience the real nature of suffering, and he found that “attachment to the five aggregates is suffering.”2 At a very deep level, suffering is the inordinate attachment that each one of us has developed toward this body and toward this mind, with its cognitions, perceptions, sensations, and reactions. People cling strongly to their identity—their mental and physical being—when actually there are only evolving processes. This clinging to an unreal idea of oneself, to something that in fact is constantly changing, is suffering. Attachment

No matter what these one-sided observers' opinion may be, we are certain that we experience good as well as evil, and feel pain and pleasure as well. Neither can we alleviate the real sufferings of the sick by telling them that sickness is no other than the absence of health, nor can we make the poor a whit richer by telling them that poverty is a mere absence of riches. How could we save the dying by persuading them that death is a bare privation of life? Is it possible to dispirit the happy by telling them that happiness is unreal, or make the fortunate miserable by telling them that fortune has no objective reality, or to make one welcome evil by telling one that it is only the absence of good? You

They behave towards their therapists as they perceive themselves to have been treated by their absent parents. They make their therapists feel very fully what it is like to be discarded, ignored, despised, helpless or even unreal and non-existent. (...) What needs to be understood in such situations is not that the child is perceiving the therapist as the insufficiently caring parent of his past experiences and revenging himself. Beyond this the child is also reversing the original situation. This time the child is identifying himself as the cruel, rejecting but powerful person and it is the therapist who is to feel rejected, hurt, helpless and…to feel the pangs of betrayal of trust and affection. In such situations the therapist cannot become genuinely trustworthy in the child’s eyes until experience has shown that he has the strength to contain the projections of the feelings that the child finds intolerable.

Rather than concentrating on fast action and unreal scenarios, some arcade games replicate a mundane real-life experience as closely as possible. This allows the player to fantasize about living a different life, an alluring concept in a country where lifetime employment with one company is the norm and career change is very rare.

Fear is a paper-thin barrier painted to look like it’s concrete. The only way to find out that this fear is illusionary is to lean into the fear and see how unreal it actually is.

Death feels at its most unreal in the mornings. My experience of death is only a few days in length, but already I can say that the nearer the day gets to evening, the closer the end always feels. Perhaps this is only natural.

But surely in that case what we think of as our free will is illusory and unreal? That depends on what you mean. It is certainly illusory to think that our wills are only free if they operate apart from God. But free will in the sense of “free agency,” as theologians have defined it—that is, the power of spontaneous, self-determining choice referred to above—is real. As a fact of creation, an aspect of our humanness, it exists, as all created things do, in God. How God sustains it and overrules it without overriding it is his secret; but that he does so is certain, both from our conscious experience of making decisions and acting “of our own free will,” and also from Scripture’s sobering insistence that we are answerable to God for our actions, just because in the moral sense they really are ours.

Dropping down dead, the birds, like Fe’s chemical, are heavier than air. Once Fe does comprehend her incomprehensible world, she realizes her own unintentional but harmful actions. She recollects how she had “more than once dumped [the chemical] down the drain at the end of the day,” which meant that it “went into the sewage system and worked its way to people’s septic tanks, vegetable gardens, kitchen taps and sun-made tea”. In this work of marvels, mysteries, and myths, it is the invisible yet substantial, mundane yet brutal flow between bodies and places that makes life in risk society a most difficult matter to comprehend. The dazzling magical realism that provokes readers to wonder what is “real” in this fictional universe parallels the confounding everyday experience of life in a world where risks are, “in a fundamental sense, both real and unreal”. The harm inflicted by the unseen chemical is already apparent in Fe’s body, even as its effects on the plants, animals, and people in her region may go undetected.

It would take only a few thousand terabytes of hard-drive space to archive a human’s entire audiovisual experience from cradle to grave.

had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me. "I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you

Sometimes you can experience a sense of unreality of the situation (derealization) or detachment from your own body (depersonalization), as though you existed outside of your body and were watching what was happening to you from afar.

Mental time travel is a powerful tool of the dopamine system. It allows us to experience a possible, though presently unreal, future as if we were there. Mental time travel depends on models because we make predictions regarding situations we haven’t yet experienced. How would my life be different if I bought this new dishwasher? What sorts of problems might an astronaut face if he traveled to Mars? What would happen if I ran that red light? Mental time travel is in constant use because it’s the mechanism for making every conscious choice in life. To the brain, each deliberate choice about the future is a matter for the dopamine system and the models it has created, whether you are deciding what to order at Burger King or the president is deciding whether to start a war. Mental time travel is responsible for every “next step” in our lives.

Luck in life is self-generated. You see more when you know more. You get more if you work more. But the billions of people on this planet will disagree with what I just said and invent some idiotic theory to comfort their ignorance on what life truly is. In fact, they will deny any of your efforts, and the harder you work, the more they will question your morality and claim some special secret to your results that they too could get if they knew about it. The average person is so immersed in their own ego that they can't possibly grasp all the unimaginable parts of reality. Reality is largely inaccessible and therefore unreal. The more you talk about it, the less you are understood, the more you are seen as a madman. Because those who don't know have to comfort their ignorance for lack of better options. Eventually, there comes a point in life when no explanation can sustain what you had before, including your ability to explain yourself to others. In fact, the more you say or try to explain, the more jealousy and slander you get. It is predestined that the more one works to better himself, the more hatred he receives from the vast masses of mediocre minds. Isolation is then not a choice, but a fate that precedes extraordinary success. One must experience it for one's own sanity, but also to fulfill what one has planted in one's soul. It must happen that the people who change the world the most are the most hated by the same people they help. As such, we must then assume that friends are for fools, as fertilizer is for plants. A real person is hardly understood by the masses. He is lucky if he finds a real friend. But as soon as he realizes that his friend is on the same intellectual level as he is, even that is proven to be predestined.

The menu was full of foods that felt like home to me, but that also had a flair of originality. Brisket and matzo balls in a hearty bowl of ramen. Lox bowls with nori and crispy rice. Savory potato kugel and boureka pastries with hummus and fried artichokes with kibbeh. Knishes with kimchi and potato filling and a gochujang aioli. "This menu is so... Jewish." "So Jewish," Seth agreed. "And make sure you're saving room for dessert. The rugelach is unreal, and the rainbow cookies are---" he looked around, then lowered his voice--- "better than my mom's." One of the things I actually missed about living in New York was seeing all the fun twists people put on Jewish and Israeli food at restaurants and in delis. Nobody was doing that in Vermont. Maybe you could do that in Vermont, something whispered in my head. I was used to just pushing that voice away, but, for once, I let myself pause and consider it. Would it be that crazy to sell babka at my café? I bet people would love a thick, tender slice of the sweet bread braided with chocolate or cinnamon sugar or even something savory with their coffee. I could experiment with fun fillings, have a daily special. Or I could rotate shakshuka or sabich sandwiches on the brunch specials menu, since they both involved eggs. My regulars might see eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce and pitas stuffed with fried eggplant, eggs, and all the salad fixings as breaths of fresh air.

Now, what is unique about the child's perception of the world? For one thing, the extreme confusion of cause-and-effect relationships; for another, extreme unreality about the limits of his own powers. The child lives in a situation of utter dependence; and when his needs are met it must seem to him that he has magical powers, real omnipotence. If he experiences pain, hunger, or discomfort, all he has to do is to scream and he is relieved and lulled by gentle, loving sounds. He is a magician and a telepath who has only to mumble and to imagine and the world turns to his desires.

The Risen Presence always appears once your False Self stops attaching, defending, denying, and blaming. As in Matthew's account (28:9), he just walks up and says, “Hi!” Paul actually says in several places that “our former selves have been crucified” already (Romans 6:6). The False Self is fragile and temporary and is thus already “over and out.” Its death knell has already rung. It is just a matter of time until you touch the true, and the false falls away like clumsy scaffolding. This is probably why some saints were pictured holding or looking at a human skull. It was not meant to be morbid but a way of picturing this shock of realization and the utter change of consciousness that follows. Once you experience the Real, the unreal is increasingly a mere diversion or entertainment, not substantial reality. Once you encounter the Risen Presence, you can rather easily let go of the past and the petty. The Risen Christ could be called the “future shock” of God. The Gospel accounts make note that the Resurrection occurs “very early on the first day of the week” (John 20:1), clearly evoking a new creation, a fresh start, a new first (Genesis 1:3–5), but now an eternal day of Easter light. And, of course, scientists now tell us that all light in the universe is electromagnetically connected and that all natural light is in fact one. The Risen Christ is the personification of this one Light that includes all light, which is why he is always described as “dazzling white” or “like lightning” (Matthew 28:3).

A good way to test the Truth in relationships is to behave the way the other person does for a while, maybe in person or by letter. If the friend is True they will behave True to themselves. If on the other hand this “friend” has been using you on an energetic level to “get you” to fulfil their needs or to dump their responsibilities. Well, then they were unreal, not a friend at all, just a fiction. Just an illusion and a lesson to be learned and thankful for. Everything you experience in life can be used for your betterment as a human being, to enable you to be Truly you. Not some false gathering and bundle of words, borrowed beliefs, thoughtforms and false actions.

The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist. We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt. There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality.

The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist. We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt. There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality.

The only thing worse than unrealized hope is no hope.

Our world is no longer a safe place. Perhaps it never was. Between 1985 and 1993, exposure to violence increased 176 percent for the average junior high school student. Fifty percent of the women in our culture will experience some form of sexual assault during their lifetimes. We are all aware of the shrinking global village. Violence in other lands seems closer than ever before. Terrorism and hatred leak across our borders. No longer can we say that it’s not our problem. We know what violence does to people. Alice Miller, the famous psychotherapist, described the process in her classic book For Your Own Good. German children in the 1920s and 1930s became acclimatized to physical violence. They saw it in their homes, where physical punishment was routine. By today’s standards, this same form of punishment would be abusive. They saw it in the streets. Germany lost a war they felt they should have won. They felt betrayed by their leaders. Political and economic chaos surrounded them. Children learned to split off from the violence. They learned to make it unreal, which is why as adults, Miller points out, they could be in the presence of concentration camps and remain unmoved.2

Here, in short, is the great danger of reading most novels, romances, and works of fiction. The greater part of them give a false or incorrect view of human nature. They paint their model men and women as they ought to be, and not as they really are. The readers of such writings get their minds filled with wrong conceptions of what the world is. Their notions of mankind become visionary and unreal. They are constantly looking for men and women such as they never meet, and expecting what they never find.

4.2.2.1.4. Teaching That the Cognition That Negates the Existence of Objects Is a Valid Cognition "If valid cognition is not valid cognition, Isn't what is validated by it delusive? In true reality, the emptiness of entities Is therefore unjustified." [138]'-" [903] This verse states the objection. The opponents might say, "If you assert in your Centrist system that even all valid cognition-which is the means of evaluation-is not valid cognition, isn't a phenomenon that is validated by it delusive too? If one analyzes in accord with true Centrist analysis, emptiness is not established, and, in consequence, meditation on emptiness is unjustified as well." Without referring to an imputed entity, One cannot apprehend the lack of this entity. Therefore, the lack of a delusive entity Is clearly delusive [too]. [139] This verse teaches that [everything] is mere delusion. Without referring to-that is, without relying on-a mere imputed entity, one is also not able to apprehend or present the lack of this entity, which is emptiness. The reason is that if one does not rely on the conventional term [or notion of] space, one is not able to present space as [referring to] the lack of any entities."" Therefore, since sentient beings cling to the reality of delusive entities that are mere appearances, they plunge into cyclic existence. If one understands that these very [appearances] are unreal and illusionlike, this [understanding] surely serves as the remedy for the [clinging to reality]. However, emptiness-which is this imputation in the sense of the lack of such delusive [appearances] that appear as entities-is clearly delusive too. In the same way as an illusory lion kills an illusory elephant, this is [nothing more than] engaging in the [particular] reification of understanding emptiness as the remedy for the reification that conceives of real [entities]. Thus, when one's son dies in a dream, The conception "He does not exist" Removes the thought that he does exist, But it is also delusive. [140] This verse teaches that the [cultivation of emptiness] is the remedy for reification. Thus, if one experiences in a dream that one's son has been born and then dies, inasmuch as this is a dream, there is definitely no difference between the [son]'s birth and his death. Still, due to one's seeing [in the dream] that he has been born, there arises the mental state that conceives, "My son exists." When there is the appearance that he has died, there emerges the conception "My son has died and now he does not exist," [904] which removes the thought that fancies, "My son does exist." However, since both-the existence and the nonexistence of this son too-are equal in being a dream, they are alike in being delusive.