To lie is human; not getting caught is divine.
Man is the only being
who can overcome himself.
His method is the Lie.
What makes one man
different from another
are the glorious possibilities
his lies contain.
- Christopher Hyatt
While we desperately yearn for the exotic and wondrous
our first act on meeting it is to turn it into ourselves.
— Hyatt
To have neither great desire nor great despair—
This — this is the goal of all "great" civilizations.
— Hyatt
When the world was made binary
man began to live in paradox.
With paradox came the priest,
the politician and the psychologist.
These three thieves of the soul
became the maker and solver of riddles,
making the poet and artist seem profound.
— Hyatt
Before this binary world—
the fearful was also sacred,
now the fearful is only fearful.
— Hyatt
You use names for things as though
they rigidly, persistently endured;
yet even the stream into which you
step a second time
is not the one you stepped into before.
— Heraclitus
THE ANTI-ZOMBIE THESIS
The foundation of all pathology is nihilism as a general
psychological state of experience.
Nihilism occurs when all ideological systems collapse—
and this includes the cereal meanings generated by culture.
The normal person avoids the extreme feelings of nihilism
by desperately clinging to those meanings and values implanted
by culture, childhood and a weak biology, regardless
of how irrational, painful and dull these meaning systems
seem to be.
Healing occurs when the person regains his feelings of
power and reinstates his ability to create meaning structures.
This theory is based on Friedrich Nietzsche's observation
that the world is a work of art, created by the self.
The "pathological" person is a failed artist, while the
"normal" person has accepted consensual art and, in this
sense, does not own the concept of personhood. In this context
it is important to constantly keep in mind that the person
himself is the work of art.
Healing occurs in the will to create and form the world
and self as one's own creation. The feeling of power, and
the rational application of it to the ends of ones own creation,
is the primary reflection of health.