In some strange, still inexplicable way, our inner worlds participate in the world outside us, something less modern, more ‘primitive’ people still experience, but which to us seems fantastic nonsense. Synchronicities, those strange meaningful coincidences, in which some thought or feeling in our inner world is paralleled by an event in the outer one, and other paranormal experiences, are one way in which this participation manifests, but there are others. One idea that runs throughout this book, as it does in my others, is that at an earlier stage in our evolution, human consciousness was much more ‘embedded’ in nature, as animals are today, and that we did not experience then, as we do now, separate outer and inner worlds, but a free flowing movement between the two.
“The question of freedom,” Wilson writes, “is not a social problem.” Only by the long, difficult, personal struggle to self-realization can the Outsider realize his goal. That realization, or actualization, as Maslow called it, requires an “intensity of will” and is fostered by anything that arouses one’s “will to more life.”
[Eichmann] had no depth, [Arendt] thought. “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all,” she wrote in an oft-quoted postscript to the book [ . “And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal,” she added; “he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.
Love is not merely the content of an impossible ethical ideal. It is the motive force of the struggle for justice.
Belief systems are not determined by the facts; it is systems of belief that determine what is to count as a fact.
You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
As Gandhi put it in his first eulogy to Mazzini in 1905, he was one of the ‘few instances in the world where a single man has brought about the uplift of his country by his strength of mind and his extreme devotion during his own lifetime’.
Delacroix wrote that ‘it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains'; as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.
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