21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

If the true nature of the universe is mystery, hidden from us, then we must accept that any explanation of such matters is beyond our grasp. The feeling of this mystery is somehow bitter-sweet — will always be conflicted as it is the meeting point of form and the formless. There is darkness in every soul. We carry with us a sense of our own mortality and perhaps vestiges of our pre-conscious past. Craziness, darkness, fear, longing, pain — these things are part of every person. To wish them away is to deny part of ourselves. So, life and love will always be bitter-sweet, because life is balanced on a knife-edge.

But what we so often seem to avoid doing is to enter into darkness and chaos. Any sign of stress or discomfort and our culture’s reaction is to immediately seek some ‘fix’. The fix is often reacting only to symptoms — anything to get us back to work — anything to return us to relative happiness and contentment. Why not instead dwell for a while in darkness? Why not withdraw from the world and spend some time in the shadows? Perhaps it is a luxury to be able to do this. But perhaps it is also our culture’s poor response to these matters that makes this seem an odd suggestion.

If the reality of who we are lies beyond what can ever be known then there is a sense in which trying to change is itself contradictory. If time is a mental construct and again not the underlying reality, then maybe there cannot be a ‘future me’ who is different from the current me. I am already all that I am going to be in some sense — or all that I ever need to be. When change is spoken of then, it can only ever

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