The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wa

It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself (Kant’s ding an sich), whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable—it does not exist.

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Whatever may be true for the Chinese and the Hindus, it is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action.

Nothing so eludes conscious inspection as consciousness itself. This is why the root of consciousness has been called, paradoxically, the unconscious.

why The Book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of “things taking their course” that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, th

not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it.

We therefore work, not for the work’s sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play.

(I am not saying that there is no personal continuity beyond death—only that believing in it keeps us in bondage.)

Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain “feeds itself” through the stomach as that the stomach “evolves” a brain at its upper entrance to get more food.