Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically different…
With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. in the actual act of deception… They are overcome by belief in themselves: It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. The founders of religions are distinguished from these great deceivers by…
A friend gave me an essay written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a leader of the “confessing church” opposing the policies of the Nazis. The Nazis aimed at eliminating Jews, promoting the ideology of Aryan purity. Bonhoeffer’s essay seems germane to our situation now, the rise of Trumpism, and…
Descent attaches itself to the body.1 It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake the effects for causes, believe in the “afterlife,” or maintain…
Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.1 Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it was developed (initially made available…
“Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then…
Wednesday is midpoint of a seven day week. The middle is regarded to be the point of balance. It is common to believe that maintaining a balance, middle of the road, porridge not too hot and not too cold, the Goldilocks principle, (and the bed not too soft and not too hard, but just…
Rob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology newsletter stimulates me to think. He is a happy warrior, samurai-like with unflagging dedication to his craft as a writer, faith in the mana/power of words to humanize us. The last newsletter from Rob offered a list of neologisms. The list is relevant, important to the work that remains in…
There is thus and element of truth in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!” –in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life…
Can all values not be turned around? And is goodness perhaps evil? And God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers? …learn to grasp the necessary…
