“Anyone who would make the descent into the lower regions runs the risk of succumbing to what the primitives call ‘the perils of the soul’- the unknown Titans that lie within, below the surface of ourselves.”

William Barrett Irrational Man 

Eternity is the motivated energy behind all movement.

The concept of eternity existing outside of space and time seems to be a false one, one that led to the failure of reason itself: if reason truly existed outside of space and time, as Plato wanted, reason would have been able to account for being. Its failure to do so seems to suggest that eternity exists within space and time, as the motivated energy behind all movement.

“It was our ordinary human existence- concrete, personal… that [Kierkegaard] saw reason on the point of ingesting into itself.” William Barrett Irrational Man

A nightmarish idea. A nightmare the positivistic  West has still not woken up from…

Kierkegaard fundamentally altered the description of moving to a higher state of being. It was no longer a vertical ascension, but rather moving from the periphery toward the center of the self.

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”

Alejandro Jodorowsk

Mathematics, logic, and therefore physics and the whole of rationality, can only describe a static universe. We all know the universe is not static. What, then, does reason describe?

 Heraclitus, “The Weeping Philosopher,” knew you never step in the same river twice, and wept because he knew the next two and a half thousand years would go against him.

Physics, specifically quantum mechanics, believes that it has discovered that nature is absurd, that “she” is inconsistent with the laws of logic and mathematics. What it has forgotten, and what the whole of the Western world has been trying to ignore for the last two and a half thousand years, is that mathematics and logic were inconsistent with organic reality from their very beginning. 1 is only equal to 1, and A only equal to A, if they exist outside of time. In fact, 1 and A only exist at all as theoretical “eternal forms,” a sort of myth invented by the ancient Greeks. So we will never have a Theory Of Everything, or for that matter a mathematical theory of anything that describes anything as it actually is. The great myth of the Western world is moribund. The world that we invented, the world we thought we could control, is in its final twilight. The question is, how will we emerge, as lunatics or as superhumans, once we have accepted that reason is dead?

“It occurred to [Kierkegaard] that since everyone was engaged everywhere in making things easy, perhaps someone might be needed to make things hard again.”

William Barrett Irrational Man

Buddha and Plato (though Buddha’s time on this earth is less precise) lived at approximately the same time. Plato said, through The First Law of Classical Knowledge, that A is equal to A. Why? Because we wanted it to be. We wanted a world we could control.

Buddha said, through The First Noble Truth of Buddhism, that nothing is permanent, nothing is eternal (or, that A is not equal to A), though we want it to be, badly, and so we suffer.

The question is, in the west, do we know why we  suffer? Is this why 1 in 5 Americans consume psychiatric “medicine,” in order not to know? Could the world we thought we could control be ceasing to exist?