Our firm beliefs about the world are compensatory in nature - they are a compensatory device whose function is to make up for the irreducible uncertainty of reality as it actually is. We make up for not being able to...
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The one thing technology can never help us with is in being original - technology is all about ‘efficient duplication’, it’s all about the ‘realisation’ (or ‘reification’) of generic ideas, and this is another type of thing entirely. When we become...
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We all know what the word ‘spontaneity’ means, but at the same time we don't really know. No one really knows, not even the most learned professor in the land! It's simply not possible to know this - if we...
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When we are inhabiting the Nominal Realm - which is the world of formal descriptions - then the one thing that is absolutely impossible here is for us to have any connection with reality. Such a thing is totally out...
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Heteronomy is that state in which the context for everything we do (and everything we think) is provided for us by some ‘arbitrary external authority’. It doesn't matter to us what this EA is, all that matters is that we...
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There is something downright misleading about the term ‘artificial intelligence’ – the term is misleading because whilst what we’re talking about here might be artificial, it has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. No one is really trying to argue...
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There are only the two things in life, we could say - there is the ‘unobserved reality’ (which is pure randomness, pure spontaneity), and there is the observed reality, the known reality, which is the reality that has been established...
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It is in the nature of reality to ‘pretend to be what it isn't’ (or to 'hide its true nature from us’) says Heraclitus. Stuff isn't straightforward in the way we always think it is, in other words. Things -...
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‘Choices’ and ‘doing’ are the same thing - making choices is ‘a doing’ - it is, in other words, the unfolding of a plan, the acting out or copying of a mental picture. This may not sound like a particularly controversial...
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We are all – it could be said - taking part in a Great Experiment - the crucial point about this experiment being that we don’t realize that it’s going on. This might be called ‘an experiment unconsciousness’, therefore. The...
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Everything the ego does it does unwillingly. Even when the ego (or ‘Mind-Created Sense of Self’) enthusiastically pursues its goals (and makes a big song and dance about how great this is) it is doing so unwillingly - it's ‘unwilling’...
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Reality isn't Buddhist, or Christian, or Muslim, or anything like that - reality is simply reality and it has nothing to do with whatever ideas we might have about it (and we always do have lots of ideas about it)....
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The Extrinsic Self - which is to say, ‘the self which is based entirely on rules’ - and the State of Openness are completely incompatible with each other. Or rather, the Extrinsic Self is incompatible with Openness, since Openness doesn't...
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We insulate ourselves from the world by labelling everything, by judging everything and then not looking any further than our judgments. This is the key to everything - to say what things are and then not look beyond whatever it...
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The Extrinsic Self is always ‘on the outside’ - it’s always ‘on the outside, looking in’. It can’t ever partake in life, even though it longs to do so; it’s always on the wrong side of an impenetrable glass wall...
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The generic is that for which there is precedence - no more needs to be said on the subject than this! What follows on from 'that which was already there' is the generic, and the generic is all most of...
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We're totally familiar with the world that is made up of comparisons - we know it very well indeed but - as regards the other world, the world that isn't made up of comparisons, the world that isn't a ratio...
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‘Very few of us know the taste of authentic things’, says Ouspensky. We're given substitutes and so - therefore - we never suspect that we have been short-changed. This isn't to say that we're doing well on these substitutes of...
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