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

making plans, it is actually a false split. There is no future me, or past me. We are all that we ever will be just in this moment! So, regretting the past or worrying over the future are pointless abstractions. Planning for the future in a reasonable manner however is to make proper use of this artificial split in the world.

How might this perspective impact on our view of time and eternity? For one thing, there may be an ever-receding horizon of knowledge, beauty and joy in the universe — so there may be no end to our potential pleasures and purposes. But at the same time, people are already all that they will ever be and in a sense all our purposes are already fulfilled or thwarted. This is just not obvious because humans are trapped — for the moment — in time. Perhaps this should inform our lives — to avoid striving, and especially striving towards ‘self-improvement’. It does not mean to give up trying, but it sets our trying within an eternal context.

There is also a split in the world with any kind of description — in fact any word causes such a split. As soon as a word is used to describe something, all other things are automatically assigned as being something else. Hence, calling something a table immediately creates a split between things that belong to the description as tables and things that don’t. However, this is no more than just a convenient way to carve up the world. Many things could serve as ‘tables’ for instance, so the description is not really an accurate one — it is just a useful designation that fits our purposes. In fact it is a little more difficult than this. To describe

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