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The idea of the Savior necessarily implies the Judge—and a judge of the most implacable sort—because the Savior is a mythological representation ofthat which is ideal, and the ideal always stands in judgment over the actual. The archetypal image of the Savior, who represents perfection or completion, is therefore terrifying in precise proportion to personal distance from the ideal.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Proclivity to posit an ideal, implicitly or explicitly, to work toward its attainment, to become dissatisfied with its establishment, as new “matter” makes itself manifest, and to thereby re-enter the cycle—this constitutes the centrally defining pattern of human abstraction and behavior. The simplest and most basic day-to-day human activities, invariably goal-directed, are necessarily predicated upon conscious or tradition-bound acceptance of a value hierarchy, defining the desired future in positive contrast to the insufficient present. To live, from the human perspective, is to act in light of what is valued, what is desired, what should be—and to maintain sufficient ignorance, in a sense, to allow belief in such value to flourish. Collapse of faith in the value hierarchy—or, more dangerously, collapse of faith in the idea of such hierarchies—brings about severe depression, intrapsychic chaos and re-emergence of existential anxiety.

Simultaneously, such myths portray qualitatively transformed consciousness as cure for that unrest (more profoundly, portray participation in the act of qualitative transformation of consciousness as cure for that unrest).

It has been almost twelve years since I first grasped the essence of the paradox that lies at the bottom of human motivation for evil: People need their group identification, because that identification protects them, literally, from the terrible forces of the unknown.

It leads inexorably to the following conclusion: the more fundamental the problem, the more fundamental the error—in my own viewpoint.

I woke up the morning after one of her lessons, and caught a fragment of the end of a dream revery. This is the idea revealed by that revery: it is the fact that differences exist between paths of action that makes actions worthwhile. I know that what is believed determines the value of things. But I had never taken this argument to its logical conclusion. If belief determines value, then the distance between good and evil gives life its meaning. The more worthwhile a path of action (which is to say, the “better” it is—the more it is good, rather than evil) the more positive emotional valence that path “contains.” This means that things have no meaning, because no differential value, for those who do not believe in good and evil.

The best I can make of it is this (and this has helped me): Nothing can exist without preconditions.

This is the message that everyone wants to hear. Risk your security. Face the unknown. Quit lying to yourself, and do what your heart truly tells you to do. You will be better for it, and so will the world.

Anomalies manifest themselves on the border between chaos and order, so to speak, and have a threatening and promising aspect. The promising aspect dominates, when the contact is voluntary, when the exploring agent is up-to-date—when the individual has explored all previous anomalies, released the “information” they contained, and built a strong personality and steady “world” from that information. The threatening aspect dominates, when the contact is involuntary, when the exploring agent is not up-to-date—when the individual has run away from evidence of his previous errors, failed to extract the information lurking behind his mistakes, weakened his personality, and destabilized his world.