M: I am dead already.
Q: ? In what sense?
M: I am double dead. Not only dead to my body, but to my mind too.
Q: Well, you do not look dead at all!
M: That's what you say! You seem to know my
state better than I do!
Q: Sorry. But I just do not understand. You say you are bodiless and mindless while I see you very much alive and articulate.
M: A tremendously complex work is going on all the time in your brain and body, are you conscious of it? Not at all. Yet for an outsider all seems to be going on intelligently and purposefully. Why not admit that ones entire personal life may sink below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly?
Q: Is it normal?
M: What is normal? Is your life -- obsessed by desires and fears, full of strife and struggle, meaningless and joyless -- normal? To be torn by feelings, tortured by thoughts: Is it normal? A healthy body, a healthy mind live largely unperceived by their owner: only occasionally, through pain and suffering they call for attention and insight. Why not extend the same to the entire personal life? One can function rightly, responding well and fully to whatever happens, without having to bring it into focus of awareness. When self-control becomes second nature, awareness shifts its focus to deeper levels of existence and action.
Q: Don't you become a robot?
M: What harm is there in making automatic, what is habitual and repetitive? It is automatic anyhow. But when it is chaotic, it causes pain and suffering and calls for attention. The entire purpose of a clean and well ordered life is to liberate man from the thralldom of chaos and the burden of sorrow.
Q: You seem to be in favor of a computerized life.
M: What is wrong with a life that is free from problems? Personality is merely a reflection of the real. Why should not the reflection be true to the original as a matter of course, automatically? Need the person have any designs of its own? The life of which it is an expression will guide it. Once you realize that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.
[This message has been edited by PeterGibbons (edited 08-07-2003).]
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