Guiding Statements (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

[Inscribed on the walls of Abraham’s mausoleum.]

What is an artist good for?  To turn the monks into drunks, and the drunks back to monks again.

Learning begins only when your teachers all leave you.  Then you are confronted by the subject.  The profile that once confronted them.  Then the process of education, the way, becomes an obvious sham.  Then you get it.  This is the ordination ceremony.  They were idiots, even if very good ones, and now you get to be one too.  

A book means: I am dead and this is my will.  Most individuals leave grave-lumps with two dates and two words of description.  But a person who authors a true book makes a deal with a daemon.  

Being a philosopher is easy.  Being a mystic is easy.  Being both is nearly impossible. 

All central components must become part of the myth: the form, the author, reader such that, for the duration of the experience, involvement is total. 

To become conscious of a process means to have entered into a new, unconscious process.  

Truth is seeing the next step forward, putting your foot down.  Omniscience is seeing the map, lifting your foot up.  

All philosophy is systematic philosophy.  To read a philosopher is to enter the system of their personality; conscious and unconscious.  Their words may contradict but that is part of one drama.