One of the main barriers to ideal behaviour is a touch of embarrassment.
As will-to-life, one of your main priorities is securing a position in the animal kingdom. When you start talking about God, or when your ethical output seems excessive, you come off strange and irrelevant.
When you're young, you're especially keen to secure a position in the animal kingdom, so you will do your best to avoid high-flung talk of God and the need to love your enemy and whatnot.
On growing old, it becomes more appropriate, although still slightly jarring.
The decline of culture today means that securing a position in the animal kingdom has become a central aim, and so almost no one is willing to talk in such grandiose terms
Now and again, a young person has an outburst of ethical output, but then they feel embarrassed afterwards.
Realising this, the person who sincerely aspires to a religious worldview will eventually acquire an appropriate degree of cynicism, which makes them contiguous with the animal kingdom.
In other words, it gives them charisma.
We say that such a person is "down to Earth", and that's exactly right.
They haven't launched off into the stratosphere and abandoned humanity entirely. They will cater to the tastes of animal nature. In fact, it's a great joy to see them lapse into a certain animalism.
When they lapse into animalism, the path out of humanity once again comes into view.
This is why reading the biographies of great men is often so reassuring. Their clumsy youthful episodes and occasional shortcomings reminds you that they are subject to the same temptations.
In addition to embarrassment, there is also the fear of shining too brightly.
If you come off too brilliantly, this makes others feel inferior. Very often it will be taken as an insult, in much the same way the existence of genius upsets mediocrities.
To overcome this, you have to let go of attachment to immediate outcomes. It should suffice that you know you did right, and that the universe in the long term is on your side.
This is true of philosophical output, just as it is of ethical output. It's also true of parenthood.
You will be scorned at first, but in the long-term, it will become apparent that you were correct—that you acted in spite of the will-to-life.
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Here is a beautiful exposition of the essential feeling of *confinement* in the material world.
She has not read a word of my philosophy, and yet, from her very real experience of the other side, explains it with perfect naivety much more vividly than my philosophy does.
I love these interviews. They're as refreshing to me as reading Schopenhauer.
These are normal people who, by accident, keep giving proof of my hard thought-out philosophy, which was often provoked by my looking at a wall or something, frustrated with the dullness of matter.
These are some of the most precious and enlightening interviews ever given, but our disgustingly philistine world refuses to take them seriously.
People insist on cash value in this world, not insights into the next.
...All cells are electrically charged, i.e. have ionic imbalance; it's just that nerve cells have a more expansive and ordered domain.)
Because of this excess of sensibility (i.e. nerves), we are axiomatically inclined to check for problems even when they aren't near.
Alcohol and opiates appeal to humans because they depress the central nervous system, and bring you to the present moment. A high enough dose will reduce you to mere vegetative function, and maybe even less than that.
Being in the present eliminates desire, and is thus pleasant.
This makes you lose control of yourself, but this very outsourcing is what makes it pleasant. You can just swing about without your usual powers of discernment.
This is why a pleb likes to mix in crowds. He can cosy up within it, and abandon his powers of discernment.
Alcohol and crowd mentality is therefore a perfect marriage.
It's not just alcohol and drug addictions I'm describing, though. All addictions are a function of the will-to-life (the will-to-life is the sovereign addiction, the engine of them all).
If, instead of that, you had built up potential without view to a kinetic outcome, you would not notice either way.
What makes you feel shame is not the build-up of potential, but the fact that you were *looking for the kinetic outcome*.
You feel ashamed of your lack of naivety. The fact that you checked afterwards makes you feel enslaved. If someone caught you looking, you would be embarrassed that you demonstrate that you care too much about what others think.
In an ideal realm, we would be Jesus-like in our behaviour.
In fact, a person whose mind isn't filled with impurities can notice this in themselves. In their daydreams, such people fantasise about loving, caring, forgiving, patience and heroism in general.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm basically describing Arianism.
I think Jesus Christ is the perfect Platonic Idea of man, but that this is distinct from God. This still makes him worthy of exclusive worship, and his story must remain in the material world.