Unreal Person Quotes

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

You hate America, don't you?' That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. (34) Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.(7) Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness....We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden reality....(281) God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. (41)

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. —From Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill

Your Shadow is all of the things, 'positive' and 'negative', that you’ve denied about yourself and hidden beneath the surface of the mask you forgot that you’re wearing.

Humans only live for a hundred years, it is as unreal as a dream that ends in an instant. What is the point of a person living in this world? No more than just being on a journey, and witnessing interesting things. Although I do not want to die, I do not fear death. I am already on my right path, I will strive to have no regrets even if I die. The only thing lacking in this world is a medicine for regret.” - Fang Yuan

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

You are lucky." "How so?" "To know where you came from." I guess I never gave it much thought.: "Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.

Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager? I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing is, it wasn’t me in my bed, it was Shirley who lay the wondering if that man was going to come to her room, pull back the cover and push his penis into her waiting mouth it was Shirley. I remembered watching her, a skinny little thing with no breasts and a dark resentful expression. She was angry. She didn’t want this man in her room doing the things he did, but she didn’t know how to stop it. He didn’t beat her, he didn’t threaten her. He just looked at her with black hypnotic eyes and she lay back with her legs apart thinking about nothing at all. And where was I? I stood to one side, or hovered overhead just below the ceiling, or rode on a magic carpet. I held my breath and watched my father pushing up and down inside Shirley’s skinny body.

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?

In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day. The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.

[Hating America] would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

As long as we ourselves are real, as long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and can do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones—I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…

The unreality of something is no reason to dismiss it. Sometimes reveries—and dreams for that matter—are more real to a person than the reality they serve to distract from.

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.

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.

Truth is not always the most entertaining guest at the dinner table, and anyway, as Duras suggests, we are always more unreal to ourselves than other people are.

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights... There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

Ishigami’s design. Yet it all still seemed too unreal to be true. Killing a person to hide a murder – who would think of something like that? Of course, that’s the point. He didn’t want us to think of it.

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.

It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible -- the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..] But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it -- really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..] I have become so indifferent about the dead.

The trails of light which they [moths] seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals..., did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom tracks created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye ,appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.

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.

He makes me believe that there are good prople in this world. When I met Michael Holden, I knew, deep down, that he was the best person you could possibly hope to be - so perfect that he was unreal. And it made me sort of hate him. However, rather than slowly learning more and more good things about him, I have come across flaw after flaw after flaw. And you know what? That's what makes me like him now. That's why he is a real perfect person. Because he is a real person.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence...To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.

Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them.

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…

Finally, the dirty little secret about sexual objectification is that it is an act that cannot be performed with any attention to its ethical meaning. Experientially —from the point of view of a man who is sexually objectifying—sexual objectification and ethical self awareness are mutually exclusive. A man cannot reflect on what he is doing and its real consequences for real people and at the same time fully accomplish the act of sexual objectifying. There's no way it can be done, because hos own subjective reality is too contingent upon the unreality of someone else. All that can be left "out there" in his field of awareness is the other person's sexedness—an abstract representation of a gender—in comparison with which his own sexedness may flourish and engorge. So it is that a man shuts off his capacity for ethical empathy—whatever capacity he may ever had—in order to commit an act of despersonalization that is "gratifying" essentially because it functions to fulfill his sense of an identity that is authentically male.

in English and Arabic. Clearly, even personal shoppers had him pegged as a complete geek. The shopper also managed to find some supplies for our magic bags—blocks of wax, twine, even some papyrus and ink—though I doubt Bes explained to her what they were for. After she left, Bes, Carter and I ordered more food from room service. We sat on the deck and watched the afternoon go by. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool and pleasant. Modern Alexandria stretched out to our left—an odd mix of gleaming high-rises, shabby, crumbling buildings, and ancient ruins. The shoreline highway was dotted with palm trees and crowded with every sort of vehicle from BMWs to donkeys. From our penthouse suite, it all seemed a bit unreal—the raw energy of the city, the bustle and congestion below —while we sat on our veranda in the sky eating fresh fruit and the last melting bits of Lenin’s head.

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

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle.

There are other ways too in which God is "absent." As long as we ourselves are real, as long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and can do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.

Since you are bold and persistent I shall be equally bold: Your questions are not real. My answers are not real. The world as you perceive it is not real. War and peace, selfish and deluded projections of aggressive-natured beings, are equally unreal. Aspirations are unreal. Solutions based in egoic identity are unreal. Nature perceived as separate from one’s self, unreal. I also, as an autonomous entity, am unreal. You—equally unreal. Life itself, as is fashioned inside the human psyche is unreal. Death too, as is imagined based upon the ill-conceived notion that we are merely our bodies and personalities, is unreal. All is illusion—unreal. The Self, timeless and spaceless, immutable, beyond all qualities, alone is real. You must look within to find and confirm this for yourself. Until and unless you do, your comprehension of the world is based on very shaky ground; a ground of naive assumptions and second-hand knowledge.

External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.

The more different someone seems from us, the more unreal they may feel to us. We can too easily ignore or dismiss people when they are of a different race or religion, when they come from a different socioeconomic “class.” Assessing them as either superior or inferior, better or worse, important or unimportant, we distance ourselves. Fixating on appearances—their looks, behavior, ways of speaking—we peg them as certain types. They are HIV positive or an alcoholic, a leftist or fundamentalist, a criminal or power monger, a feminist or do-gooder. Sometimes our typecasting has more to do with temperament—the person is boring or narcissistic, needy or pushy, anxious or depressed. Whether extreme or subtle, typing others makes the real human invisible to our eyes and closes our heart.

life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I was physically debilitated, my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced. The lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognizable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity.

Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much! And he to me - and the giving and the taking Seemed so right: not in terms of calculation Of what was good for the persons we had been But for the new person, us. If I could feel As I did then, even now it would seem right. And then I found we were only strangers And that there had been neither giving nor taking But that we had merely made use of each other Each for his purpose. That's horrible. Can we only love Something created by our own imagination? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? The one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors’ houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I asked ceaseless questions. One evening I heard a tale that rendered

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

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.

It is always a shock to meet again someone whom you have not seen for a long time but who has been very much present in your mind during that period. When at last Sophia came through the swing doors our meeting seemed completely unreal. She was wearing black, and that, in some curious way, startled me! Most other women were wearing black, but I got it into my head that it was definitely mourning—and it surprised me that Sophia should be the kind of person who did wear black—even for a near relative.

None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawksmoor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.

Of what use is unrealized divinity to anyone? If he is unconscious of his higher self, is a man any better off? The link of being linked with God potentially is not enough. It must also be personally discovered, felt, known, and demonstrated in living activity.

The calamities that are constantly being reported - battles, massacres, famines, revolutions - tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.

The man who aims at his own aggrandizement underrates everything else. Compared to his ego the rest of the world is unreal. Thus in order to be fully conscious of the reality of all, one has to be free himself from the bonds of personal desires. This discipline we have to go through to prepare ourselves for our social duties - for sharing the burdens of our fellow-beings. Every endeavor to attain a larger life requires of man "to gain by giving away, and not to be greedy." And thus to expand gradually the consciousness of one's unity with all is the striving of humanity.

Digital information has an unbelievably high R0 [basic reproductive rate], and this means that it's hard to stop once it emerges. It spreads from person to person - even those at a great distance - incredibly quickly, thanks to its high transmissibility and the high interconnectedness of digital society. Once it escapes into the wild, it's all but impossible to stop its spread. This is wonderful, so long as the information is correct and useful. But if it's wrong, if it alters our brains for the worse, if it makes us make mistakes and think incorrect things, it's a scourge.

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.

Metaphysics, said the late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct; but metaphysics has changed in the meantime, and is now the finding of bad reasons for what we cannot possibly believe however hard we try. All I can say is that the disbelief in the reality of consciousness or personal identity has never prevented anyone from copyrighting his book in which that unreality is argued; and I very much doubt that any author of such a book has ever been completely indifferent as to the bank account into which its royalties were paid.

You can fall in love with an image and you can forget whom this image really belongs to! You can look at the reflection and completely forget what is reflected! You can ignore the real and follow the unreal! But ultimately, your destination will not be where you want to arrive! You will only arrive in something fake!

Our life is like a journey…’ – and so the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle, member of a family and clan and entangled by professional duties, by the habits of an ‘everyday life’ woven from all these circumstances, we often feel too secure, believing our house built for all the future, easily induced to believe in a constancy that makes ageing a problem for one person and each change in external circumstances a catastrophe for another. We forget that this is a process, that the earth is in constant motion and that we too are affected by ebbs and tides, earthquakes and events far beyond our visible and tangible spheres: beggars, kings, figures in the same great game. We forget it for our would-be peace of mind, which then is built on shifting sand. We forget it so as not to fear. And fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands and what affects us directly, denying the force of the fire that’s sweeping our neighbour’s house, but not yet ours. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid – the horror that sometimes seizes us, you feel it too when reading history books, time or space, it doesn’t matter what lies between us and it. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space – and a city with a magical, unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath.

You idiot! What do you call a person who plays the piano?’ she said, a steely glint in her eyes. ‘Pi . . . Pianist?’ Derek mumbled. ‘And a person who exorcises?’ ‘Ex . . . Exorcist?’ ‘So what would you call a person who prepares Mayo . . . whatever?’ she screeched. And then the ball dropped. A trembling Derek gasped, ‘Mayo . . . ist! Shit!

We can do things that are greater than ourselves. If you believe nothing exists beyond a certain boundary, then you will never test the veracity of that belief and you will never discover new possibilities....Maybe there are truly extraordinary people out there, but I'm not one of them. The most extraordinary acts are accomplished by ordinary people doing something a little extra and stepping ouiside their personal comfort zone....I often wonder how much human potential lies unrealized and untapped, how much we are limited by our own fears as well as by social, cultural, religious, and self-imposed limitations. If we can break through those, how far might we go as individuals, as a species?

However, even before the orgies of neoliberalism it was obvious that capitalism is not socially efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially useful science to the existence of public education and public transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had capitalism foisted on them.3 All this testifies to a “market failure,” or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-capital and every other4—and which is propelled by the structural necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard neoclassical economics, which makes such assumptions as perfect knowledge, perfect capital and labor flexibility, the absence of firms with “market power,” the absence of government, and in general the myth of homo economicus—the person susceptible of no other considerations than those of pure “economic rationality”—is societal harmony going to result.

An actor, to spend his entire life as an actor, has to have the mind of a child. A writer at sixty can be a Steinbeck, a Faulkner, or a Hemingway. An actor at sixty can make a funny face or do a creaky dance. The actor lives a reasonable-facsimile existence while cavorting in an unreal world. The value of an actor’s services are determined by the needs of another person.

There is a joke in which Satan is talking with one of his fallen angels while looking at the foibles of humans on the earth. “What should we do?” implores the helper. “See there, a human has gotten hold of a piece of truth!” Unperturbed, the Prince of Darkness replies, “Don’t worry, these humans will try to institutionalize it, and then it will belong to us again.” By midlife your identity is the institutionalization of your past. You have good reason to be attached to it, but it is not all of who you are meant to be. By reflexively living in the past you miss the fullness of the present. The movement of energy into structure (having an ego) is necessary for life to cohere. We need form, yet we are best served when the conscious personality is capable of ongoing course correction through dialogue with the dynamic unconscious.

That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they were not analogous to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to intoxication by hashish, opium or wine. Of that he could judge, when the attack was over. These instants were characterized--to define it in a word--by an intense quickening of the sense of personality. Since, in the last conscious moment preceding the attack, he could say to himself, with full understanding of his words: "I would give my whole life for this one instant," then doubtless to him it really was worth a lifetime. For the rest, he thought the dialectical part of his argument of little worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy. No argument was possible on that point. His conclusion, his estimate of the "moment," doubtless contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation troubled him. What's more unanswerable than a fact? And this fact had occurred. The prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime.

We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.” I wasn’t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.

Eternal Rest. If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal God—true: therefore—well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this, its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical, nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two elements—matter and force;

You hate America, don't you?' 'That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

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.

As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who'd gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly- but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn't that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt.

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.

I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.

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.

Maybe I . . . shouldn’t tell him what I thought I’d heard. Not until I knew more. How exactly would I put the revelation anyway? Jack’s alive, but apparently he kept that little detail secret. Ah, but Matthew spilled the beans! Buying myself time, I waved Aric on. I was scarcely listening as he began talking about Paul, of all people. How the EMT had grown worried when I’d been shut in with my grandmother for so long. How I had lost weight and become listless. The man had pleaded with me to get a checkup, even offering to source contraception after Aric and I had started sleeping together. Wait. I glanced up. “After?” Aric nodded. “He said you told him you had no need of contraception.” The hell? “I went to him and got a shot prior to us getting together. I told you about it.” “As I told him in turn, but he swears that never happened.” Real? Unreal? Had I . . . imagined my meeting with Paul? I’d already feared gaps in my memory; Gran had told me things that I’d had no recollection of. Was I now inventing memories? Had I invented Jack’s return? In a soothing voice, Aric said, “I’m not angry, love. Just talk to me.” He wasn’t the first person to look at me as if I’d gone insane, like I was trouble with the possibility of rubble. Won’t be the last. No. I refused this. I had heard Jack, and I had gotten that shot. “It did happen, which means Paul’s a liar.” But why would he lie? “I’m going to confront him.” In time. Right now, all I wanted was to hear from Matthew again. Yet I frowned as a thought occurred. “Why would you be talking to Paul about contraception?” Aric tucked my hair behind my ear. “Sievā,” he said gently, “do you not know you’re pregnant?” Tick-tock.

To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and of secret consolation. Our destiny (in contrast to Swedenborg's hell and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty. This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves.

Be Unrealistic (The Sonnet) Be unrealistic and work for a world, That the society considers nonsense. Once upon a time taming fire was unreal, Then arose a bunch of brave sentience. Today's madness is tomorrow's sanity, If we’re mad enough to stand solo on guard. Today's sacrifice is tomorrow's civilization, If we can give all without hoping reward. If only one person dies for the cause, A hundred people realize their humanity. I may die today in the line of duty, But the struggle continues through eternity. So let us be brave and go beyond reality. Let us be accountable and do the necessary.

You hate America, don’t you?” she said. “That would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.” “You’ve changed so,” she said. “People should be changed by world wars,” I said, “else what are world wars for?

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.

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we bear to take in so much of it.

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

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

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.

Writers allow us to see ourselves more clearly, they express spiritual signposts that assist us find ourselves. Writers’ self-revelations allow us to grasp personal reflections that remain unrealized and indistinct within ourselves. Nuggets of personal perception remain veiled, until we read carefully chosen words sharing the author’s crystallized perceptions. Provocative authors resolutely tap into that robust vein of common yearning and assiduously engineer their way through humankind’s rampant library of collective neurosis. Reading a master’s scintillating prose allows our own inchoate thoughts to shape up under the splendid beam of sunlight that they cast onto pages bearing their soul’s freshly minted words. Their astutely crafted pages conveying everlasting imagery immunizes their work from the harshness of time’s relentless march forward.

I couldn’t believe my problem was extrinsic. I wanted to die because I was an idiot and could never improve, never move forward or do better—not because I was sick and therefore locked in a skewed perception of the world and myself within it. It’s not just me. Again and again, people I’ve spoken to bring up their sense of isolation, that theirs is a personal flaw unique to themselves, not something faced by others, certainly not something fixable. Debilitation—that inability to get out of bed, to interact with people—fuels self-revulsion. I loathed myself for the endless stasis, projects unrealized and opportunities ungrasped. I felt I was expending all my energy on the most basic level of functioning and had nothing to show for it—just years of going through the motions. And the worse I felt, the less motivated I was to pursue treatments that felt ineffectual.

Everything and Nothing* There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paintings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. At first he thought that everyone was like him, but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe that hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species. He thought at one point that books might hold some remedy for his condition, and so he learned the "little Latin and less Greek" that a contemporary would later mention. Then he reflected that what he was looking for might be found in the performance of an elemental ritual of humanity, and so he allowed himself to be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long evening in June. At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his "nobodiness" might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to; he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Cassar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages. For twenty years he inhabited that guided and directed hallucination, but one morning he was overwhelmed with the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many unrequited lovers who come together, separate, and melodiously expire. That very day, he decided to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his birthplace, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood and did not associate them with those others, fabled with mythological allusion and Latin words, that his muse had celebrated. He had to be somebody; he became a retired businessman who'd made a fortune and had an interest in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. It was in that role that he dictated the arid last will and testament that we know today, from which he deliberately banished every trace of sentiment or literature. Friends from London would visit his re-treat, and he would once again play the role of poet for them. History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I , who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me, are many, yet no one.

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me. As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual business of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which we'd been ignorant until then.

The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate

Elizabeth automatically started forward three steps, then halted, mesmerized. An acre of thick Aubusson carpet stretched across the book-lined room, and at the far end of it, seated behind a massive baronial desk with his shirtsleeves folded up on tanned forearms, was the man who had lied in the little cottage in Scotland and shot at a tree limb with her. Oblivious to the other three men in the room who were politely coming to their feet, Elizabeth watched Ian arise with that same natural grace that seemed so much a part of him. With a growing sense of unreality she heard him excuse himself to his visitors, saw him move away from behind his desk, and watched him start toward her with long, purposeful strides. He grew larger as he neared, his broad shoulders blocking her view of the room, his amber eyes searching her face, his smile one of amusement and uncertainty. “Elizabeth?” he said. Her eyes wide with embarrassed admiration, Elizabeth allowed him to lift her hand to his lips before she said softly, “I could kill you.” He grinned at the contrast between her words and her voice. “I know.” “You might have told me.” “I hoped to surprise you.” More correctly, he had hoped she didn’t know, and now he had his proof: Just as he had thought, Elizabeth had agreed to marry him without knowing anything of his personal wealth. That expression of dazed disbelief on her face had been real. He’d needed to see it for himself, which was why he’d instructed his butler to bring her to him as soon as she arrived. Ian had his proof, and with it came the knowledge that no matter how much she refused to admit it to him or to herself, she loved him. She could insist for now and all time that all she wanted from marriage was independence, and now Ian could endure it with equanimity. Because she loved him. Elizabeth watched the expressions play across his face. Thinking he was waiting for her to say more about his splendid house, she gave him a jaunty smile and teasingly said, “’Twill be a sacrifice, to be sure, but I shall contrive to endure the hardship of living in such a place as this. How many rooms are there?” she asked. His brows rose in mockery. “One hundred and eighty-two.” “A small place of modest proportions,” she countered lightly. “I suppose we’ll just have to make do.” Ian thought they were going to do very well.

Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,” I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious, as might be, for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say who saw nothing), as in an opera a melodic theme introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor-cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month—in which I turned over and over in my mind, like a tune of which one never tires, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, of which the desire that they excited in me retained something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for a person—I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith on the eve of his entry into Paradise. Thus, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with the organs of my senses what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all—though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew— it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions that most inflamed my desire, by seeming to offer the promise that it would be gratified.

Christopher Robin [In April of 1996 the international press carried the news of the death, at age seventy-five, of Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized in a book by his father, A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, as Christopher Robin.] I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment. Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. 'Old bear,' he answered. 'I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called in for an afternoon snack.

March 16 The Master Assizes For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:10 Paul says that we must all, preacher and people alike, “appear before the judgement seat of Christ.” If you learn to live in the white light of Christ here and now, judgement finally will cause you to delight in the work of God in you. Keep yourself steadily faced by the judgement seat of Christ; walk now in the light of the holiest you know. A wrong temper of mind about another soul will end in the spirit of the devil, no matter how saintly you are. One carnal judgement, and the end of it is hell in you. Drag it to the light at once and say—“My God, I have been guilty there.” If you don’t, hardness will come all through. The penalty of sin is confirmation in sin. It is not only God who punishes for sin; sin confirms itself in the sinner and gives back full pay. No struggling or praying will enable you to stop doing some things, and the penalty of sin is that gradually you get used to it and do not know that it is sin. No power save the incoming of the Holy Ghost can alter the inherent consequences of sin. “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light.” Walking in the light means for many of us walking according to our standard for another person. The deadliest Pharisaism to-day is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.

They sat islanded in their foreignness, irrelevant now that the holiday season had ended, anachronistic, outstaying their welcome, no longer necessary to anyone's plans. Priorities had shifted; the little town was settling down for its long uninterrupted hibernation. No one came here in the winter. The weather was too bleak, the snow too distant, the amenities too sparse to tempt visitors. And they felt that the backs of the residents had been turned on them with a sigh of relief, reminding them of their transitory nature, their fundamental unreality. And when Monica at last succeeded in ordering coffee, they still sat, glumly, for another ten minutes, before the busy waitress remembered their order. 'Homesick,' said Edith finally. 'Yes.' But she thought of her little house as if it had existed in another life, another dimension. She thought of it as something to which she might never return. The seasons had changed since she last saw it; she was no longer the person who could sit up in bed in the early morning and let the sun warm her shoulders and the light make her impatient for the day to begin. That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself. She bent her head over her coffee, trying to believe that it was the steam rising from the cup that was making her eyes prick. This cannot go on, she thought.

Byron’s diabolism, if indeed it deserves the name, was of a mixed type. He shared, to some extent, Shelley’s Promethean attitude, and the Romantic passion for Liberty; and this passion, which inspired his more political outbursts, combined with the image of himself as a man of action to bring about the Greek adventure. And his Promethean attitude merges into a Satanic (Miltonic) attitude. The romantic conception of Milton’s Satan is semi-Promethean, and also contemplates Pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who liked to pose as a proud man – the possibility of the two attitudes being combined in the same person does not make them any less dissimilar in the abstract. Byron was certainly a vain man, in quite simple ways: I can’t complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Radulphus – eight-and-forty manors (If that my memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy’s banners. His sense of damnation was also mitigated by a touch of unreality: to a man so occupied with himself and with the figure he was cutting nothing outside could be altogether real. It is therefore impossible to make out of his diabolism anything coherent or rational. He was able to have it both ways, it seems; and to think of himself both as an individual isolated and superior to other men because of his own crimes, and as a naturally good and generous nature distorted by the crimes committed against it by others. It is this inconsistent creature that turns up as the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred and Cain; only as Don Juan does he get nearer to the truth about himself. But in this strange composition of attitudes and beliefs the element that seems to me most real and deep is that of a perversion of the Calvinist faith of his mother’s ancestors.

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.

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.

And when I wrote my play, how wrong I went. Was I such an emulator and fool that I needed a third party to tell us about the fate of two people who were making life difficult for each other? How easily I fell into that trap. And I surely ought to have known that this third party, who appears in all lives and literatures, this ghost of a third person, has no meaning at all, that he ought to be disavowed. He is one of Nature’s pretexts, for she is always at pains to distract humanity from her deepest secrets. He is the screen behind which a drama unfolds. He is the noise at the entrance to the voiceless quiet of a genuine conflict. I’m tempted to think that everyone has hitherto found it too difficult to speak about the two people at the heart of it; the third one, precisely because he is so unreal, is the easiest part of the task, anyone could write him. Right from the beginning of these dramas you notice their impatience to get to the third party, they can hardly wait for him to appear. Once he’s there, everything is fine. But how boring it is if he’s late, absolutely nothing can happen without him, everything comes to a standstill, pauses, waits. Yes, and what if they didn’t get past this pile-up, this logjam? What if, Mr Playwright, and you, the Public, who know about life, what if he were lost without trace, this well-liked man-about-town or this bumptious young person who fits into every marriage like a master-key? What if, for instance, he has been whisked off by the Devil? Let’s assume he has. You suddenly notice the artificial emptiness of theatres, they’re walled up like dangerous holes, and only the moths from the cushioned edges of the boxes tumble down through the hollow space with nothing to hold on to. Playwrights no longer enjoy the exclusive areas of town. All the prying public is looking on their behalf in the far corners of the world for the irreplaceable person who was the very embodiment of the action. And at the same time they’re living amongst the people, not these ‘third parties’, but the two people about whom an incredible amount could be said, but about whom nothing has ever yet been said, although they suffer and get on with things and don’t know how to manage.

One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives. Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded. Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ... That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration.

He sent messages to all fifteen of my former suitors, asking if they were still interested in marrying me-“ “Oh, my God,” Alex breathed. “-and, if they were, he volunteered to send me to them for a few days, properly chaperoned by Lucinda,” Elizabeth recited in that same strangled tone, “so that we could both discover if we still suit.” “Oh, my God,” Alex said again, with more force. “Twelve of them declined,” she continued, and she watched Alex wince in embarrassed sympathy. “But three of them agreed, and now I am to be sent off to visit them. Since Lucinda can’t return from Devon until I go to visit the third-suitor, who’s in Scotland,” she said, almost choking on the word as she applied it to Ian Thornton, “I shall have to pass Berta off as my aunt to the first two.” “Berta!” Bentner burst out in disgust. “Your aunt? The silly widgeon’s afraid of her shadow.” Threatened by another uncontrollable surge of mirth, Elizabeth looked at both her friends. “Berta is the least of my problems However, do continue invoking God’s name, for it’s going to take a miracle to survive this.” “Who are the suitors?” Alex asked, her alarm increased by Elizabeth’s odd smile as she replied, “I don’t recall two of them. It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it,” she continued with dazed mirth, “that two grown men could have met a young girl at her debut and hared off to her brother to ask for her hand, and she can’t remember anything about them, except one of their names.” “No,” Alex said cautiously, “it isn’t remarkable. You were, are, very beautiful, and that is the way it’s done. A young girl makes her debut at seventeen, and gentlemen look her over, often in the most cursory fashion, and decide if they want her. Then they apply for her hand. I can’t think it is reasonable or just to betroth a young girl to someone with whom she’s scarcely acquainted and then expect her to develop a lasting affection for him after she is wed, but the ton does regard it as the civilized way to manage marriages.” “It’s actually quite the opposite-it’s rather barbaric, when you reflect on it,” Elizabeth stated, willing to be diverted from her personal calamity by a discussion of almost anything else. “Elizabeth, who are the suitors? Perhaps I know of them and can help you remember.” Elizabeth sighed. “The first is Sir Francis Belhaven-“ “You’re joking!” Alex exploded, drawing an alarmed glance from Bentner. When Elizabeth merely lifted her delicate brows and waited for information, Alex continued angrily, “Why, he’s-he’s a dreadful old roué. There’s no polite way to describe him. He’s stout and balding, and his debauchery is a joke among the ton because he’s so flagrant and foolish. He’s an unparalleled pinchpenny to boot-a nipsqueeze!” “At least we have that last in common,” Elizabeth tried to tease, but her glance was on Bentner, who in his agitation was deflowering an entire healthy bush. “Benter,” she said gently, touched by how much he obviously cared for her plight, “you can tell the dead blooms from the live ones by their color.” “Who’s the second suitor?” Alex persisted in growing alarm. “Lord John Marchman.” When Alex looked blank, Elizabeth added, “The Earl of Canford.” Comprehension dawned, and Alex nodded slowly. “I’m not acquainted with him, but I have heard of him.” “Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” Elizabeth said, choking back a laugh, because everything seemed more absurd, more unreal by the moment.

When I got to Broderbund (around noon), it felt unreal. For three hours I’d been a stranger with no money, no friends, no escape hatch. My personality, my sense of myself, was stripped away. I was Man, waiting for Bus. It was primal.

It was all so unreal, like the moment of receiving a mortal blow, and I closed my eyes hoping I could shut out the nightmare. In the first shock-waves, the world seemed to disintegrate around me with sickening finality. I know at first I felt fear for the safety of my family and horror at the disclosure of an intimate and highly personal event in my life, but the initial shock of it was replaced by a towering rage. I was livid with anger and I don't hesitate to admit it. To me, that message was a symbol of a brutal and cruel betrayal. A lifetime of agonizing unhappiness, two years of medical treatment and two surgical operations had been telescoped into a couple of succinct lines on a telegraph form, and I knew without being told that it would go far beyond that hospital room.

Life is like a game; strive to be the boss, not just an NPC.

However, the worst horrors of unhappy love should not blind us to the enrichment that may occur even in painful love. When the outcome of love is unhappy, the lover may nonetheless have experienced the liberating effects of love and be able to preserve the fruits of that liberation, whether in expanded creativity, enlarged insight, or a subtle internal re-ordering of personality. There are even instances in which an unrealized love has served as the organizing force in a creative life: Dante is the classic example. For some, the memory of a lost love may provide the sweetness of an entire life.

In the Divine Spirit the relation between person and nature is defined in another manner. In the Divine Spirit, there is nothing in a given or unrealized state. This Spirit is totally and thoroughly transparent to itself.

Underachievement is not an affliction but a description of unrealized potential.

In our deepest hearts we know that being charmed is unreal. All our lives, what we really have been looking for is blessing. We once lay on a mother’s breast, looking for a face. We were not looking for magic because we did not need it. All we needed was a person. One day we will come to the end of our lives. Whatever magic medicine managed to do will have come to an end. Our need at that moment will be just what it was the moment we were born.

Unrealized potential is like a locked treasure chest. With support and self-belief, an underachieving person can unlock the richness within.

Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend's company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, hand without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal. For the simple reason that, when a man is a doctor, he comes to have his own of physical suffering, and to acquire somewhat more imagination than the average.

as he spoke. “You look great. How do you feel about looking like a completely different person, if you don’t mind my asking?” “I don’t really know. At first I thought it was great, and I suppose I still do. It’s all just so unreal to me still, you know?” I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe. I feel like I’m still in a coma and I’ll wake up any day now.” “I sure hope not,” Carl said. “I don’t want to have to come all this way to collect you again.” I laughed, as lame as his joke was. He always knew how to cheer me up. “Thanks again, Carl.” “You’re welcome,” he replied, shifting gears. I felt my breathing speed up and struggled to keep myself calm. “Narel,” Carl said, startling me, “I know you told me on the phone several times, but mostly I was watching The Real Housewives of Melbourne at the time so I wasn’t really listening. How are you for money? With your accident, I mean. Did work give you time off?” “I did tell you!” I exclaimed, excited to discuss the news in person. “I’ve quit my job.” Carl’s eyebrows shot up when I said that. “I know you said you had that big settlement, but has it come through yet? How are you for money?” It was obvious he was earnestly worried. “Better than ever. As you know, I settled out of court with the other driver from the accident. I told you he was a driver for a big national company. They’ve already paid up. Carl, I don’t think I’m going to have many money troubles from here on.” I beamed at him. “Narel, trust you to downplay something like that. ‘Don’t think you’ll have many money troubles’? Most people would settle for saying ‘I’m filthy stinking rich.’” Carl laughed. “Well, I suppose I am,” I agreed, laughing too. “I could’ve made more money if the case had gone ahead, I guess, but I

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.

Even though there are times I do not feel real. I rarely get sick—maybe I have a preternatural immunity acquired as the descendant of the one Indigene in ten who survived all of the Old World diseases that descended upon us. My lucky-gened ancestor may have bequeathed to me this resilience. At the same time, losing everyone else you love is obliterating. And some believe that trauma changes a person genetically. I don’t know if that’s possible, but if it is, along with the rude good health I have an inherited sense of oblivion. Once in a while I encounter that oblivion in the form of an unreal me. This unreal me is paralyzed by one bottomless thought: I didn’t choose this format. I didn’t choose to be organized into a Tookie. What, or who, made that happen? Why? What will happen if I do not accept this outrage? It isn’t easy to stay organized in this shape. I can feel what it would be like to stop making that effort. Without constant work the format called me would decay. I close ‘my’ eyes and meet Budgie’s puzzled gaze. There was no struggle on his face. Just a question. What is this? What was this? They are the questions I ask the gauze curtains.

Acquaintance rather than friend. The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

Illusions of a lover! Illusions have neither a past nor any present, They always seem to hang in the moments of the future, For when experienced one never knows what they mean or represent, But they always arise from the person’s conscience and the stature, As for those who are in love everything is an illusion, When with her even real appears more real, When not with her even real seems unreal, a sort of hallucination, A dawn of new reality where everything is surreal, Only her smiles, her charms, her kisses, and her deep eyes exist, And the heart seeks its indulgences in them, And ah how much like a wanton kid it does persist, To only chase her, and seek her as if she were the most precious gem, The sun peeps in from the still and motionless curtains, And the weary eyes open hoping its rays will bring her along, But then everything drowns in the loud calls of martins, Until every sound resembles her voice and her beautiful song, Then nothing exists, neither the Sun, nor the curtains, and not even martins, Only your song and your endless memories, And the heart dutifully warbles to mind these emotional bulletins, So, I rest my head on a pile of your feelings and bid farewell to all my worries! And now it is me and your feelings spread all over, The heart stops beating, the mind stops to think, For now Irma, begins the journey called forever, Where moments do not pass as eyes blink, Because the heart does not beat and the mind does not think, Making time irrelevant and unnecessary, And as in this moment called forever we sink, We now only seek what is necessary, You, your memories, your charms and your smiles, As this restful state extends into eternity, It marks an end of life’s tribulations and trials, Because now your feelings envelope me to create a new feeling of serenity!

When discussing Madame Bovary—the book and the lady herself—I shall use romantic in the following sense: "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind,

When discussing Madame Bovary—the book and the lady herself—I shall use romantic in the following sense: "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body. [..] It is, of course, inevitable that an individual whose experience of himself is of this order can no more live in a 'secure' world than he can be secure 'in himself.

A person who doesn't have friends must explain himself to strangers, I read that in a poem once, and I saw how even my "best" friends were thusly unreal: I had to explain myself constantly, always, to everyone.

While we are in that condition of darkness, we cannot have true fellowship with our brother either--for we are not real with him, and no one can have fellowship with an unreal person.

You hate America, don’t you?” she said. “That would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

Although all of the above-mentioned five doctrines were preached by the Buddha Himself, yet there are some that belong to the Sudden, while others to the Gradual, Teachings. If there were persons of the middle or the lowest grade of understanding, He first taught the most superficial doctrine, then the less superficial, and "Gradually" led them up to the profound. At the outset of His career as a teacher He preached the first doctrine to enable them to give up evil and abide by good; next He preached the second and the third doctrine that they might remove the Pollution and attain to the Purity; and, lastly, He preached the fourth and the fifth doctrine to destroy their attachment to unreal forms, and to show the Ultimate Reality. (Thus) He reduced (all) the temporary doctrines into the eternal one, and taught them how to practise the Law according to the eternal and attain to Buddhahood. 'If

If there is a person of the highest grade of understanding, he may first of all learn the most profound, next the less profound, and, lastly, the most superficial doctrine-that is, he may at the outset come "Suddenly" to the understanding of the One Reality of True Spirit, as it is taught in the fifth doctrine. When the Spiritual Reality is disclosed before his mind's eye, he may naturally see that it originally transcends all appearances which are unreal, and that unrealities appear on account of illusion, their existence depending on Reality. Then he must give up evil, practise good, put away unrealities by the wisdom of Enlightenment, and reduce them to Reality. When unrealities are all gone, and Reality alone remains complete, he is called the Dharma-kaya-Buddha.' CHAPTER

it record now then zip off and play it for its owners in person? What were the odds that the Astrals had an entirely different means of surveillance —one so different as to be unreal —and had only loosed it now? Piper wasn’t buying it. But there was more to it. More reason to disbelieve that the shadow had ratted them out. “I don’t think it’s against us,” Piper

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.

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little unreal?

The problem with resolutions for change is that they are often formed from the unstated and unreal belief that we are overcoming a personal deficiency in order to reach a happier state.

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 insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

That's the hardest thing to cope with when a young person dies—especially when they've been murdered. The unfulfilled dreams, the unrealized potential. The people close to them—family, friends—thought they had so much time to make up for mistakes, plenty of time down the road to tell that person they loved them. Suddenly that time is gone.

Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowl­ edge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemol­ ogy encouraged by Western modernity. The latter's telos is pro­ vided by the category of the object: to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject, which has been inevitably and illegitimately projected onto the object. To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects). Subjects, just like objects, are regarded as the results of a process ofobjectification: the subject constitutes or recognizes itselfin the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself "from the outside" as a thing. Our epistemologi­ cal game, then, is objectification; what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal. The form of the Other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to "personify," to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known. The key is to know, in Guimaraes Rosa's phrase, "the who of things," with­ out which there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of"why." The form ofthe Other is the person.

Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowl­edge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemol­ogy encouraged by Western modernity. The latter's telos is pro­vided by the category of the object: to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject, which has been inevitably and illegitimately projected onto the object. To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects). Subjects, just like objects, are regarded as the results of a process of objectification: the subject constitutes or recognizes itself in the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself "from the outside" as a thing. Our epistemologi­cal game, then, is objectification; what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal. The form of the Other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to "personify," to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known. The key is to know, in Guimaraes Rosa's phrase, "the who of things," with­ out which there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of "why." The form of the Other is the person.

The corridor was so long he could barely see the galvanized steel door at the end. As he made his way down, a sense of deep unreality set in. The unrealness of the place was so intoxicating he could barely stand it. He glanced at the steel door. And he was overwhelmed by the feeling that he’d gone as far as a person could, that he’d left behind everything he’d ever known. It was so silent in the hallway he could hear his own breath. And for a moment he was what a person really is: just the naked, frightened will to know. To finally understand.

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states. From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ānanda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption. Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yoginī is in touch with the Reality beyond the bodymind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: “Yoga is balance (samatva).” This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the “vision of sameness” (sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame. This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samādhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration. Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.

Since the term "fairy tale" by definition implies unreality, censorship can be minimal, especially if in the end good triumphs over evil, justice reigns, the sinner is punished, and the good person is rewarded; that is, if denial undoes the tale's insights into the truth. For the world is not just, goodness is seldom rewarded, and the cruelest deeds are selddom punished. Yet we tell all this to our children, who, like us, would naturally like to believe that the world is the way we are presenting it to them. (...) At the same time, there need be no fear of offending anyone, for the original author is unknown, the story has been recast countless times, and the truth has often been turned upside down, although sometimes it has managed to remain intact because it is so well hidden behind an innocuous mask that no one has been upset by it.

She smiled a free, beautiful and perfectly natural smile. “And you cannot do a damn thing about all this, darling, unless you destroy Mavis Weld utterly and finally.” “Last night she proved she was willing to destroy herself.” “If she was not acting.” She looked at me sharply and laughed. “That hurt, did it not? You are in love with her.” I said slowly, “That would be kind of silly. I could sit in the dark with her and hold hands, but for how long? In a little while she will drift off into a haze of glamour and expensive clothes and froth and unreality and muted sex. She won’t be a real person any more. Just a voice from a sound track, a face on a screen. I’d want more than that.

Instead of focusing, in the style of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) approach, on a single exemplary conscious experience—like the experience of “seeing the color red”—Tononi and Edelman asked what was characteristic about conscious experiences in general. They made a simple but profound observation: that conscious experiences—all conscious experiences—are both informative and integrated. From this starting point, they made claims about the neural basis of every conscious experience, not just of specific experiences of seeing red, or feeling jealous, or suffering a toothache. The idea of consciousness as simultaneously informative and integrated needs a little unpacking. Let’s start with information. What does it mean to say that conscious experiences are “informative”? Edelman and Tononi did not mean this in the sense that reading a newspaper can be informative, but in a sense that, though it might at first seem trivial, conceals a great deal of richness. Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computer monitors, and clouds—an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that are simultaneously present in the background of my inner universe. At any one time, we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is—mathematically—what is meant by “information.” The informativeness of a particular conscious experience is not a function of how rich or detailed it is, or of how enlightening it is to the person having that experience. Listening to Nina Simone while eating strawberries on a roller coaster rules out just as many alternative experiences as does sitting with eyes closed in a silent room, experiencing close to nothing. Each experience reduces uncertainty with respect to the range of possible experiences by the same amount. In this view, the “what-it-is-like-ness” of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealized but possible things that it is not. An experience of pure redness is the way that it is, not because of any intrinsic property of “redness,” but because red is not blue, green, or any other color, or any smell, or a thought or a feeling of regret or indeed any other form of mental content whatsoever. Redness is redness because of all the things it isn’t, and the same goes for all other conscious experiences.

And the famous invocation is for light and understanding: ‘Lead me from the unreal to the real! Lead me from darkness to light! Lead me from death to immortality.’… There is no humility about this quest, the humility before an all-powerful deity, so often associated with religion. In a morning prayer, the sun is addressed thus: ‘O sun of refulgent glory, I am the same person as makes thee what thou art.’ What a superb self-confidence!

also, to his side. So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian during times of the most captivating military achievement, awkward, with no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind a fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one whom they had never seen, as if with him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman. Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any Cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth, And

It is the American way to buy and sell houses and properties continually in the course of moving for the sake of upward mobility and self-improvement. Stagnation is the enemy of the American way. The same person owning the same property since 1906 is unnatural and Unamerican.

Activating unconscious content is important because the unconscious contains unrealized potentials, which if discovered and integrated into one’s consciousness, can result in a personal transformation. To discover and nourish these potentials within Campbell called the “pathway to bliss”. Myths of individuals undergoing heroic adventures as they attempt to actualize their higher potentials and find their own unique pathway to bliss are abundant in many cultures throughout history. While these myths vary in detail depending on their time and place of origin, they share a common pattern which Joseph Campbell coined the “myth of the hero’s journey”.

But Freud was also wary of art's tendency to confuse reality and unreality. If Leonardo was a neurotic, then he needed to be cured. Freud, like his near-contemporary Wölfflin, was biased towards order and composition: composition of the artwork, composition of the personality. This bias supported a sequestering and marginalization of avant-garde art, whose basic principle was mistrust of composition. But then Freud was not an avant-garde thinker. Like Aby Warburg, he saw the potential for disorder in the human personality but sought to contain that potential.

The contradiction of a belief, ideal or system of values, causes cognitive dissonance that can be resolved by changing the challenged belief yet, instead of effecting change, the resultant mental stress restores psychological consonance to the person, by misperception, rejection or refutation of the contradiction, seeking moral support from people who share the contradicted beliefs or acting to persuade other people that the contradiction is unreal” Hence a mob if you are familiar with social media. You know how this goes … you post some new belief or idea that you are contemplating. Rather than discussion or addressing the belief itself, often those responding just simply turn to attacking your character, your background, or just overall ganging up on you to tell you that you are wrong. Rarely will someone engage in actual discussion of the idea itself. You know what I am talking about. We have all had someone tag in their friends or maybe we have done it ourselves. Hmmmm …

The amount of good she’s done that people ignore or don’t know about is unreal. She’s always racing around to help and giving everything to others. People seem to question why I love her, but I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t get the person she is.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

[...] 'other people provide me with my existence'. On his own, he feels that he is empty and nobody. 'I can't feel real unless there is someone there.... ' Nevertheless, he cannot feel at ease with another person, because he feels as 'in danger' with others as by himself. He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. He makes friends with people he does not really like and is rather cool to those with whom he would 'really' like to be friends. No one, therefore, really knows him, or understands him. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretence and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile. What he longs for most is the possibility of 'a moment of recognition', but whenever this by chance occurs, when he has by accident 'given himself away', he is covered in confusion and suffused with panic.

[...] But the person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal. The actual 'world' for that person becomes shrunken and impoverished. The 'reality' of the physical world and other persons ceases to be used as a pabulum for the creative exercise of imagination, and hence comes to have less and less significance in itself. Phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of 'reality', becomes more and more empty and volatilized. The 'self whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous becomes less and less a reality-self, and more and more phantasticized as it becomes more and more engaged in phantastic relationships with its own phantoms (imagos) [The inner self in the schizoid condition].

Fermina Daza could not understand why she was not picked up when she seemed so distressed, but the Captain explained that she was the ghost of a drowned woman whose deceptive signals were intended to lure ships off course into the dangerous whirlpools along the other bank. García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who had no need of the distinction between the living and the dead. What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.

In actual human experience this is likely to be first felt in a heightened sense of the presence of Christ. He is felt to be a real Person and to be intimately, ravishingly near. Then all other spiritual objects begin to stand out clearly before the mind. Grace, forgiveness, cleansing take on a form of almost bodily clearness. Prayer loses its unmeaning quality and becomes a sweet conversation with Someone actually there. Love for God and for the children of God takes possession of the soul. We feel ourselves near to heaven and it is now the earth and the world that begin to seem un-real. We know them now for what they are, realities indeed, but like stage scenery here for one brief hour and soon to pass away.

The severed parts of the self are projected in relationships. They are often the basis of hatred and prejudice. The severed parts of the self may be experienced as a split personality or even multiple personalities. This happens often with victims who have been through traumatic physical and sexual violation. To be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in. The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also pervaded by a low-grade chronic depression. This has to do with the sadness of losing one’s authentic self. Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame is the rejection of the self by the self. SHAME AS FALSE SELF Because the exposure of self to self lies at the heart of neurotic shame, escape from the self is necessary. The escape from self is accomplished by creating a false self. The false self is always more or less than human. The false self may be a perfectionist or a slob, a family Hero or a family Scapegoat. As the false self is formed, the authentic self goes into hiding. Years later the layers of defense and pretense are so intense that one loses all conscious awareness of who one really is. However, as we’ll discuss in Chapter Twelve, the true self never gets away. It is crucial to see that the false self may be as polar opposite as a super-achieving perfectionist or an addict in an alley.

Now we have complicated the question a little more by our analysis of freedom. The Outsider wants to be free; he doesn’t want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. He is an Outsider because he wants to be free. And what characterizes the ‘bondage5 of the once-born? Unreality, the Outsider replies. So we can at least say that, whatever the Outsider wants to become, that new condition of being will be characterized by a perception of reality. And reality ?—what can the Outsider tell us about that? That is more difficult. We have got two distinct sets of answers. Let us try posing the question to various Outsiders, and compare their answers: So, our question: What is Reality? Barbusse: Knowledge of the depths of human nature. Wells: The Cinema sheet; man’s utter nothingness. Roquentin: Naked existence that paralyses and negates the human mind. Meursault: Glory. The Universe’s magnificent indifference. No matter what these stupid and half-real human beings do, the reality is serene and unchanging. This is a fuller answer than the other three; we can follow it up by asking Meursault: And what of the human soul? Meursault: Its ground is the same as that of the universe. Man escapes his triviality by approaching his own fundamental indifference to everyday life. Hemingway too would give us some such answer. Ask him what he means by ‘reality’: Krebs: The moment when you do ‘the one thing, the only thing’, when you know you’re not merely a trivial, superficial counter on the social chessboard. Strowde: Ineffable. Unlivable. The man who has seen it is spoilt for everyday life.

Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination. And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention: To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity. Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge. But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect. Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’: Each man is in his spectre’s power Until the arrival of that hour When his humanity awakes And casts his spectre into the lake... The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness. Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’. Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.

How can I hate someone who only ever gave me love? thought Veronika, confused, trying to check her feelings. But it was too late; her hatred had been unleashed; she had opened the door to her personal hell. She hated the love she had been given because it had asked for nothing in return, which was absurd, unreal, against the laws of nature. That love asking for nothing in return had managed to fill her with guilt, with a desire to fulfill another's expectations, even if that meant giving up everything she had dreamed of for herself. It was a love that for years had tried to hide from her the difficulties and the corruption that existed in the world, ignoring the fact that one day she would have to find this out, and would then be defenseless against them.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle…Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

A dreaming person does not know that a nightmare is unreal until he wakes up.

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.

Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Once again, I stared at him: only this stare was different from those other stares. A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn't know what I wanted [...] It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship. The person on the other side of the membrane seemed as unreal to me as I felt myself to be to him [...] the memory of that fine, invisible separation haunted me; and more often than I like to remember, I saw it glistening as I gazed into the face of a man who loved me but was not persuaded that I needed what he needed to feel like a human being.

And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones—I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

be gone. Single use. Do not use Doctor Béchamp’s Cleanse All Disinfectant and Floor Cleaner with alcohol or healing potions. Do not operate heavy machinery after use. Or heavy-bladed weaponry. Do not use on summoned creatures, imps, devils, demons, extra-planar entities, celestials, fiends, familiars, or Darby O’Gillis. In rare cases, side effects may occur, including but not limited to: headaches, body aches, imaginary aches, unreal aches, obsessive truth telling, explosive diarrhea, loss of the ability to see the color puce, hair loss, hair growth, incorporeality, aura discharge, and mild stomach upset. In some rare cases damnation and eternal suffering may occur. Please discuss with your doctor, sage, witch, witchdoctor, haruspex, or personal hag before use. Use at your own risk.

Becoming real simply because he'd appeared on a few thousand TV screens. Growing up with a sense that media events were real, and personal events were not. Anything that didn't happen on television didn't happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still it defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.

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

All of us find some aspect of reality too hard to see as it is—even when we know better. That usually isn’t a problem when it remains personal, but it can be a problem when a village or a duchy all accepts unreality.

Evil has always been symbolized by darkness, and Good by light, and hidden within the symbol is contained the perfect interpretation, the reality; for, just as light always floods the universe, and darkness is only a mere speck or shadow cast by a small body intercepting a few rays of the illimitable light, so the Light of the Supreme Good is the positive and life-giving power which floods the universe, and evil the insignificant shadow cast by the self that intercepts and shuts off the illuminating rays which strive for entrance. When night folds the world in its black impenetrable mantle, no matter how dense the darkness, it covers but the small space of half our little planet, while the whole universe is ablaze with living light, and every soul knows that it will awake in the light in the morning. Know, then, that when the dark night of sorrow, pain, or misfortune settles down upon your soul, and you stumble along with weary and uncertain steps, that you are merely intercepting your own personal desires between yourself and the boundless light of joy and bliss, and the dark shadow that covers you is cast by none and nothing but yourself. And just as the darkness without is but a negative shadow, an unreality which comes from nowhere, goes to nowhere, and has no abiding dwelling place, so the darkness within is equally a negative shadow passing over the evolving and Lightborn soul.

The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting, and disbelieving its actual existence.

There is a common instinct that fantasy, even when gratified, does not contribute to, but is in fact more likely to detract from, personal satisfaction. I here offer a semi-philosophical reason for thinking that this instinct might have sound. It seems to me that the fantasy-ridden soul will tend to have a diminished sense of the objectivity of his world, and a diminished sense of his own agency within it. The habit of pursuing the realized unreal seems to conflict with the habit, which we all, I believe, have reason to acquire, of pursuing what is real. There is no expenditure of effort involved in the gratification of fantasy, and hence the fantasist is engaged in no transformation of his world. On the contrary his desires invade and permeate his world, which ceases to have any independent meaning. The nature of the fantasy object is dictated by the passion which seeks to realize it; and the world therefore has no power either to control or resist the passion. Normal passions are founded on the sense of the independent reality of their object. They do not invade, but on the contrary, are disciplined by, the world. The change as understanding changes, and come, in time, to bear the imprint both of the subject’s agency and of the world’s reality. Thus it is with the greatest of human benefits- love between equals. In love, all my fantasy is destroyed just so soon as it is erected, by the deeper desire to understand and respond to a being whose essence resides in his independence, in his freedom from me. It seems to be no accident that people have repeatedly described sexual fantasy as ‘loveless’.

Barbara saw the matter from the author’s standpoint, and, although she could not explain it in plain English, she knew that it was impossible to alter the appearance of her characters; for an author does not consciously create his characters, they come to him readymade with all their characteristics firmly fixed, and the author can do nothing with his character but accept or reject him. He cannot change or modify the personality that has arisen without making him unreal.

A REAL story can put you on the path to creation; an UNREAL story will put you on the path to destruction.

We can either see the storm as something that has come to destroy us or something that has come to wash away anything that we carry inside ourselves that’s unreal.

Shame causes us to force things that can never be forced, see the real as unreal, and treat the fragments as the whole.

If we can do things to want nothing, do nothing, and become nothing whilst filling ourselves completely with life, then it’s probably pretty REAL; if we’re doing it to want ‘more’, do ‘more’, and become ‘more’, then we might be lapsing into being UNREAL.

Everything REAL is rooted in and caused by the same fundamental ROOT: its connection to the TRUTH of wholeness. Everything UNREAL is disconnected or deviates from this in some way so that it becomes fragmented.

Fate is the cards you’ve been dealt in life. Destiny is what you choose to do with them and how you’ll play the game in either a real or unreal way.

And then the sea, bright and unreal as a painting. She's never seen so many shades of blue" gleaming turquoise near the breakers; further out, a blue so dark it's almost black. Lucy shivers, thinking of the world beneath the spangled waves. The coastline curves around, so that she can see the cliffs on the other side of the bay, honeycombed with caves. Devil's Lookout. It's the same view she's seen already, on Jess's postcard, but the photographer hadn't quite captured the eeriness of the cliff face. In person, the caves look deeper and darker; one in particular, closest to the waterline, is large enough that she can almost imagine a demon lurking there, surveying the sea below. A prickle starts at the base of Lucy's spine. Maybe it's the knowledge of what the water would do to her skin. She imagines the waves lapping at her like tongues, stripping her of flesh until she is nothing but bone, gleaming white. Or perhaps it's the podcast; the thought of all those missing men, presumed drowned. But with the prickling fear there's a strange pull, too. Lucy struggles to tear her gaze from the bright waves, mesmerized by the way they curl over the shore. A part of her wants to get closer, to feel spindrift on her face, slick rock beneath her palms.

Is depression a new thing? An old thing? Is it becoming more prevalent, or are we just diagnosing it more readily? I discovered that while the more colorful and memorable depictions of mental illness tend to involve mania and psychosis, the Bible, Arab medicine, Greek mythology, and centuries of European spiritual and pseudoscientific record-keeping all make reference to enduring despair beyond any external trigger. First-century physician Ishaq ibn Imran called melancholy "that feeling of dejection and isolation which forms in the soul because of something which the patients think is real but which is in fact unreal.

It's not just me. Again and again, people I've spoken to bring up their sense of isolation, that theirs is a personal flaw unique to themselves, not something faced by others, certainly not something fixable. Debilitation—that inability to get out of bed, to interact with people—fuels self-revulsion. I loathed myself for the endless stasis, projects unrealized and opportunities ungrasped. I felt I was expending all my energy on the most basic level of functioning and had nothing to show for it—just years of going through the motions.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones—I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Scheler defines love as a spiritual movement toward the highest possible value of the loved person, a spiritual act in which this highest value—which he calls the “salvation” of a person—is apprehended. Spranger makes a similar comment: that love perceives the value potentialities in the beloved person. Von Hattingberg expresses it differently: love sees a person the way God “meant” him. Love, we may say, reveals to us the valuational image of a human being. In so doing, it performs a metaphysical act. For the valuational image revealed to us in the course of the spiritual act of love is essentially the “image” of something invisible, unreal—unrealized. In the spiritual act of love we apprehend a person not only as what he “is” in his uniqueness and singularity, his hæcceitas in scholastic terminology, but also as what he can and will be: his entelechy.

Another person in the business has told me “I have always thought that investing is something to do, rather than to talk about.” Investment involves the fluctuating ownership from a sedentary position of what were once pieces of paper and have now been virtualised so that they are no more than entries in some faceless computer records. It is an activity which can seem unreal.

Reality is in secrecy, not in openness. Because anything can be reflected outwardly, it is open to manipulation. Whether that reflection is genuine or not can only be revealed when a deep relationship is developed with that person. The sacred hides. A genuine soul does not scream; it whispers. True connection, the kind that shakes the bones, requires mystery and unknowing. But modern culture, in its desperation for validation, has sterilized all tension; dating is now a checklist, or friendship is now a series of performed affirmations. Everyone is "relatable," and thus, no one is real.

A wonderful companion Is one who is humble and kind Yet stern and straight forward in times when their strength is tested One who teaches you to be a better person throughout your moments together And also shows you there's a fine line between being a nice person and being trampled over The one who teaches you how to love Not just with a word or gifts But through the way they read your mind through gestures The way one would say to other "can I help you with that" "I'll take over you seem exhausted" "We are always a team" The one who would value your hard work and dedication even if you never have that huge bank balance, fancy car or luxury house The one who looks at you and feels happiness in their hearts just because you mean so much The person who doesn't care whose eyes are on themselves they only care that their eye is always on you When learning about eachother you realise that you both grow together and grow into each other Your character rubs off on your person The person who feels pain if you feel pain It may sound unreal but why have a companion who can't walk beside you even at your worst The person who will always try to understand you, your actions and your response before playing the blame game The person who prays for you and prays with you The one who helps you achieve your goal but can also guide you on the practical path if your goal is unrealistic The person who says I'm always here, we will always be and I will not let things fall apart when life gets tougher And that my dear is companionship In the end all your beauty, wealth, and material goods won't satisfy your life in a way that a good humble companion would

Dark Triad personalities, who organize regimes of networked psychopaths, typically succumb to the very unreality their regimes cultivate. Stalin was the most effective and successful of the Dark Triad dictators; but even his success must be qualified by the fact that he was only saved by massive economic and military assistance from the United States. If Putin is to be saved, the United States will have to turn against Ukraine and Europe and join Putin the way Roosevelt teamed up with Stalin. Trump is being pushed in this direction, though the mechanism for pushing is hidden.

I want to make my terms very clear. I don’t believe reality is malleable, variable, or constructed. Reality is as unyielding as a policeman’s club. Unlike that club, however, the shared reality of 320 million persons can’t be experienced directly: it’s mediated. For the last century and a half, the elites, and even more the institutions they manage, have been the arbiters of mediated certainty and truth. The government addressed social “problems” and placed difficult national episodes in perspective. The news media selected for the public’s attention a handful of topics and events. Scientific institutions gave out trusted advice on health and other specialized matters. Each of these institutions possessed a semi-monopoly over the information in its own domain. They were keepers of the stories that explained us to ourselves. They uttered, from above, the authoritative truth. What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible. Let’s examine Donald Trump in this context. The president tells falsehoods. As might be expected, his opponents have condemned him as a deliberate liar—and this might well be the case. But many of Trump’s lies seem politically pointless. Why would he complain about voter fraud in an election he won? What impact can the size of an inaugural crowd possibly have? Another thesis, no less problematic, can account for such odd behavior. The president may just be a creature of our fractured age: he speaks,

Writing a novel is something beyond horror... Habil Yashar Writing a novel is something beyond horror... First of all, it can take months, even years, to think about what topic to write about. Just as you cannot determine when your time will come, you cannot even determine what topic to write about. It is born suddenly - from the impact that some event or some person has on you, or from something completely different. Its birth is so strange that... Perhaps stranger, more mysterious, more mysterious than the birth of a person... The birth of a person is based on certain laws, but there are no rules or any order in writing a novel. How can one write something whose birth is so strange... Imagine the difference between the feeling of waiting for the next lines with inexplicable excitement when you finish the first sentence, and the feeling of seeing the pages and sheets pile up and finally seeing the completion of a novel... Every line you write, every line you think is perhaps written at the cost of your blood, the ink is just a tool. For a writer, the nights spent writing can be so bright that they don't feel dark, because he is enlightened while writing, he lives while writing, but at the same time, the mornings can be as shocking as darkness, because he is always searching for something to write, always thinking. It shouldn't be so easy for you to write the fate of every character you create, to have a shadow and always follow it no matter where it is. You put so much life into unreal characters that you don't care about your own life as much as you give it your all. Because, you, yes, you are responsible for the fate of every character you create and you bear a great responsibility for every event that has happened to them or will happen. If non-writers are responsible for their families, and in a broader sense, humanity, then if writers are responsible for each of the characters they create (at the same time, they are also responsible to their families and humanity, like everyone else), imagine the weight of the burden they carry. Aside from responsibility, writers sacrifice even their health for them. But in return, they gain the name of a writer, eternity. Characters dominate your soul so much that... It's as if they are always around you, in dialogue with you. Regardless of where and when, they won't let go of you, they'll joke with you, they can even judge you and make you cry. Because, non-existent characters actually come to you as if they were real, and sometimes you think of yourself, not them, but rather as a non-existent being, flowing away like water. Perhaps they are your closest friends, confidants, heroes. Because in each of them there are sparks of your thoughts, of your energy. But along with all this, you have also given them freedom, leaving it up to them to choose in everything. Otherwise, in addition to being a dictatorial writer, you will be remembered as someone who does not respect their characters... Doesn't the existence of a writer depend on the perfection of their characters as well as on their works? Writing is something beyond horror, just as it is something beyond life. Habil Yashar

No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from the proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp—there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me.“No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and

No,” said Dorian Gray, “there is nothing fearful about it. It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment—about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six—you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered—I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from the proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp—there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me.

In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column for our whole intellectual system. It was thought to be inessential, connected with dictatorial regimes, but in fact it forms an essential part of every contemporary kind of politics in our context. Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer's mind and enables everything to be explained. This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity. It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the world of phenomena. We are all familiar with these explanatory myths: the bourgeois myth of the hand of Moscow, the socialist myth of the 200 families, the fascist myth of the Jews, the communist myth of the anti-revolutionary saboteur, and so forth and so on. But what is obviously very serious is that human beings today no longer possess any other means of intellectual coherence and political inquiry than this myth. If they dispense with it, they can retreat from the world they live in and lead their individual lives, but that is a suicidal way out, because they cannot isolate themselves from the world as we have constructed it. This myth... is also for our contemporaries their one stable point of thought and consciousness. It provides understanding and coherence and also seems to be the one fixed element amid the swirl of facts. This enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience. What prodigious saving of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles! People of our day have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens, and whatever they do, they can rely on an explanation that myth provides. This process places them within the most complete unreality possible. They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of 'mass persons', who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.