Real physical anxiety or panic is located in the gut.
In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race—Thomas Ligotti writes, “To entertain ourselves for a spell, let us proclaim that if it were not for tragedy, the human race would have gone extinct long ago. It keeps us on our toes and pushes us towards the future in a paradoxical search to purge the tragic from our lives.”
This time last year, late August, I really had no idea of all the changes that were going to take place in my life, and I thought at that time that maybe my life was as stable as it had ever been—and that was probably true. Many good things and many bad things have happened in the last 12 months. Many really terrible, crushing things, and many more good things, I should say. A steady stream of good news punctuated by, in some cases, unbearable realities.
I sometimes feel like my tragic intuitions produce tragic outcomes; I don’t trust reality, and so reality pays me back in kind.
I would like to regain my focus, to live inside a world that has no outside. The mental world, the creative mental world of a lucid dream, where everything is unreal but hyperdoxically more real.
The only answer to entropy is creation. When energy is taken out of the system, you have to put it back in.
Famously, the physicist Steven Weinberg said—and notoriously, I should say—“The more we know about the universe, the more meaningless it appears.”
I say: the more we learn about the soul, the more meaningful it appears.
Consciousness often intervenes and kills the animal-love, the creature-love, between people, but it also intervenes and reduces the animal violence between people in other instances.1
Mind and body are supposed to fit together, somehow. And this is one of the most mysterious matters of human life.
Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon.
Discourse in the classical Aristotelian sense means a complex set of formal inferences. Discourse in the Lithuanian and modern sense means a complex system of informal inferences. Logos was a system of philosophers to determine truth. Logos now is a system of crowds to predict what will be commonly taken as true.
In coming to understand the world, you realize your essence.
Abstract thinking has a certain purity and beauty that is not derived from its abstraction from the world, ironically, but from its distillation of it. The best abstract thinking is the crystallization of reality, not a removal reality from reality.
Difference will always be punished within the organized structure of Petit Bourgeois American civilization.
So many social phenomena, so many moral panics, for instance, can be explained simply by the fact that we don’t have any kind of other strata in our society. There’s the Petit Bourgeoisie who have money, and there’s the Petit Bourgeoisie who don’t have much money, and the Petit Bourgeoisie who have no money—but there are no real distinctions in taste, and perception, and philosophy, and perspective.
Beauty, sensuality, emotion—if you have these things, you’ve been given a great gift, and you’ve been given them by nature, and above nature, God. And so to spend your life trying to find a way to slot your beauty, your sensuality, your emotion—in a word, your goodness—into a basically evil structure, the passively evil structure of Petit Bourgeois neurosis, is to violate your own God-given potential. 2
A lot of bad things happen because not a single person will stand up for the good. The bad is kind of the entropic force that takes advantage of any kind of passive defense of the good.
This is an irony. Consciousness is a regulatory system—or at least one layer of consciousness is. The regulation of the animal produces the fatal neurotic strangling of the animal by consciousness. There’s got to be a series of other steps if consciousness can find balance with the body.
Of course there’s something more that you’re meant for, that you are. But you can create a self-confirming prophecy that you are not by cutting yourself off from everything that you are.