Overview

"Anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology recast in the image of the mad weeping primate: it slowly dawns on this creature what he is. What this work demands is not something most of the human race is prepared to give. They neither want it, nor need it, nor think it possible: to seek freedom from those very consolations which appear to give life its meaning and scope. This freedom is an esoteric luxury sought by ascetics with nothing to lose: it costs exorbitant energetic quanta to resist the instinct of mythopoesis - this hydra has no particularly vulnerable locus, and more or less cannot be defeated. What we achieve is not ""freedom from delusion"", but ""freedom for illusion"" a little creative room, a little joyful participation, a little less neurosis and compulsion in our dreams. If we can become less reactive, less prone to spasmodic plagiarism, less fixated on childish fantasy, less prone to geriatric moral sentiment, less feeble in imagination and the tolerance of contradiction, less eager to resolve every dilemma and banish every dark premonition that's ever crossed the desk of humanity's collective catalogue of nightmare... then we will have matured, grown deeper roots, and learned receptivity. In the aftermath, comes receptivity: reality as we find it, sparkling wavering reality, like the swirling taste of cinnamon and tamarind, spicy and sweet and bitter all at once - it offers no logical neatness, no curling conclusion, no bedtime story with tucked-away questions and the swallowed seam of unraveling consequence... What we desire is maturity without despair; gratitude without hope; affection without cloying; knowledge without foreclosure."

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9781737889410

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