We see no wisdom or message in life’s events because we are conditioned to thinking of them as dumb and perfunctory. And since both life and world are often unfair—which, sure enough, they really are, as fairness is a human concept, not an inherent value of nature—we rebel against and refuse to listen to them, thereby missing out on the

To Westerners, however, life and world are the teacher. Life teaches, as I hope to have illustrated through the example of my own life, discussed at length in the foregoing. An uncompromisingly Western life requires no guru, for guidance is provided by the Daimon, which expresses itself equally within and without, in self and world.

In yet another distinction that ultimately leads to the same result, the Eastern mind seeks its own completeness by removing itself from time, so to experience itself in the timeless domain of deep introspection. Indeed, outside time we haven’t lost any part of ourselves to the past or are yet to express any part of ourselves in the future;

illusions still point to something real—just as an airplane’s dashboard tells us something real about the sky—and hence remain interesting. Illusions have meaning in that they represent something beyond themselves.

Owen Barfield talked of “appearances” versus “the unrepresented”; Henry Corbin of “symbols” versus “imagination”; Schopenhauer of “representations” versus “Will”; Immanuel Kant of “phenomena” versus “noumena”; Emanuel Swedenborg of “correspondences” versus “spirit”; Spinoza of “natura naturata” (also “modes”) versus “natura naturans” (also

Both the Eastern and Western minds have achieved the awareness that the so-called “physical” world—i.e., the contents of perception—is mere appearance, not the real world as it is in and of itself. The latter is concealed from us by the intermediation of perception, which merely represents the world, without being the world.

The only way for our choices to become known is for us to make them—God Itself cannot know them in advance. The only way for us to know our destiny is to live it, embody it. Only then does nature figure out what has always been latent in its own being,

Life in the world is an epic, sacrificial research effort in the enterprise of natural self-discovery. The more we pay attention to life as teacher, the more successful the effort will be.

nothing can know our future before we get there ourselves, because we are too complex for our choices to be anticipated. Every choice we make is a moment of self-discovery, therein lies its meaning: “oh, I am that which makes such a choice under these circumstances; how interesting.”