// Master Game // 20.12.14
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. - Freud on religion.
I presume that you have chosen the right moment for this expedition. Every perfect debauch requires perfect leisure. Besides, hashish not only magnifies the individual, but also the circumstance and environment. You must have no duties to accomplish that require punctuality or exactitude, no pangs of love, no domestic preoccupations, grief or anxieties. The memories of duty will sound a death kneel through your intoxication and poison your pleasure. Anxiety will change to anguish, grief to torture. But if the conditions are right and the weather is good, if you are in a favourable environment as in the midst of a picturesque landscape or in a room artistically decorated, if moreover, you can hope to hear some music, then all’s for the best. - Baudelaire.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man. Lo! I show you the last man. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like the ground flea. The last man lives longest. - Nietzsche
It may be asked why one should make great efforts to enter the fourth room when things have been made so easy and pleasant in the third room. For there is no doubt about it; we of the so-called advanced nations live, on the whole, like kings. Better than kings. Not all the wealth of Croesus could have bought him even so common-place an experience as a flight through the air. Nor did all the riches of Egypt suffice to give Cleopatra freedom from the pangs of childbirth. The great ones of antiquity were as prone to pestilence as the meanest of their slaves. Even for the rich, life was dangerous and uncomfortable. For the poor it was one long struggle to keep body and soul together. Things are very different now. Watched over from cradle to grave by a paternalistic government, protected from overwork by unions, from hunger by the bounty of a scientific agriculture, from pestilence by an art of medicine so advanced that all the great plagues of antiquity have been conquered, soothed by tranquilisers or stimulated by anti-depressants, perpetually hypnotized by the unending circuses offered by television, radio, the movies, why should we ask for more? When the third room is comfortable, safe and full of delights, why should we strive to ascend to the fourth? What does it have to offer that the third does not? The answer is of course freedom. Only when he enters the fourth room does a man become free. Man in the third room may think he is his own master, but actually he has no control over his actions. He can not do so much as walk down a street without losing his attention to every stray impression that takes his fancy. Man in the fourth room really is his own master. He knows where he is going, what he is doing, why he is doing it. His secret is that he remains unattached to the results of his activity, measures his success and failures not in terms of outward achievement, but in terms of inner awareness. He is able, as a results of his knowledge of forces at work about him, to know what is possible and what is impossible, what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved. All sort of miraculous achievements are accepted as possible, for man in the third state of consciousness tends to love miracles and to believe all sorts of nonsense that could not possibly happen. In the fourth state of consciousness such naiveté disappears. A man knows what combination of forces can produce what sort of results. He knows everything happens in accordance with certain laws governing the relations of matter and energy. He knows that there is no miracle and anything that appears to be a miracle is merely a manifestation of some rare combination or forces, like the rare combination of skill and knowledge that enabled the master magician Houdini to extricate himself for every form of restraint that was ever applied to him.
There is no such thing as a perfect diet, because the needs of the organism change from day to day, and food intake must be adjusted to balance these needs.
Live unknown. Make your wants few. Fame is a delusion, grandeur a pitiful rag, wealth a mirage, security a will-o-the wisp. He alone is rich who has transcended his personal ego, is no loner deluded by ideas of ‘I’ and ‘Mine’. He alone is secure who has created within himself an island which no flood can engulf.
No matter how intensely he practices Creative Psychology, it will no change a person's type. The slender, skinny ectomorph will never become a roly-poly endomorph, nor will the high cerebrotonic, with his love of solitude, hatred of noise and crowds, ever acquire the temperament of a high somatotonic, with his indifference to noise, or a high viserotonic, with his love of company and his gluttonous appetite.
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. - Freud on religion.
I presume that you have chosen the right moment for this expedition. Every perfect debauch requires perfect leisure. Besides, hashish not only magnifies the individual, but also the circumstance and environment. You must have no duties to accomplish that require punctuality or exactitude, no pangs of love, no domestic preoccupations, grief or anxieties. The memories of duty will sound a death kneel through your intoxication and poison your pleasure. Anxiety will change to anguish, grief to torture. But if the conditions are right and the weather is good, if you are in a favourable environment as in the midst of a picturesque landscape or in a room artistically decorated, if moreover, you can hope to hear some music, then all’s for the best. - Baudelaire.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man. Lo! I show you the last man. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like the ground flea. The last man lives longest. - Nietzsche
It may be asked why one should make great efforts to enter the fourth room when things have been made so easy and pleasant in the third room. For there is no doubt about it; we of the so-called advanced nations live, on the whole, like kings. Better than kings. Not all the wealth of Croesus could have bought him even so common-place an experience as a flight through the air. Nor did all the riches of Egypt suffice to give Cleopatra freedom from the pangs of childbirth. The great ones of antiquity were as prone to pestilence as the meanest of their slaves. Even for the rich, life was dangerous and uncomfortable. For the poor it was one long struggle to keep body and soul together. Things are very different now. Watched over from cradle to grave by a paternalistic government, protected from overwork by unions, from hunger by the bounty of a scientific agriculture, from pestilence by an art of medicine so advanced that all the great plagues of antiquity have been conquered, soothed by tranquilisers or stimulated by anti-depressants, perpetually hypnotized by the unending circuses offered by television, radio, the movies, why should we ask for more? When the third room is comfortable, safe and full of delights, why should we strive to ascend to the fourth? What does it have to offer that the third does not? The answer is of course freedom. Only when he enters the fourth room does a man become free. Man in the third room may think he is his own master, but actually he has no control over his actions. He can not do so much as walk down a street without losing his attention to every stray impression that takes his fancy. Man in the fourth room really is his own master. He knows where he is going, what he is doing, why he is doing it. His secret is that he remains unattached to the results of his activity, measures his success and failures not in terms of outward achievement, but in terms of inner awareness. He is able, as a results of his knowledge of forces at work about him, to know what is possible and what is impossible, what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved. All sort of miraculous achievements are accepted as possible, for man in the third state of consciousness tends to love miracles and to believe all sorts of nonsense that could not possibly happen. In the fourth state of consciousness such naiveté disappears. A man knows what combination of forces can produce what sort of results. He knows everything happens in accordance with certain laws governing the relations of matter and energy. He knows that there is no miracle and anything that appears to be a miracle is merely a manifestation of some rare combination or forces, like the rare combination of skill and knowledge that enabled the master magician Houdini to extricate himself for every form of restraint that was ever applied to him.
There is no such thing as a perfect diet, because the needs of the organism change from day to day, and food intake must be adjusted to balance these needs.
Live unknown. Make your wants few. Fame is a delusion, grandeur a pitiful rag, wealth a mirage, security a will-o-the wisp. He alone is rich who has transcended his personal ego, is no loner deluded by ideas of ‘I’ and ‘Mine’. He alone is secure who has created within himself an island which no flood can engulf.
No matter how intensely he practices Creative Psychology, it will no change a person's type. The slender, skinny ectomorph will never become a roly-poly endomorph, nor will the high cerebrotonic, with his love of solitude, hatred of noise and crowds, ever acquire the temperament of a high somatotonic, with his indifference to noise, or a high viserotonic, with his love of company and his gluttonous appetite.
