As you retreat from the chaos into your own little prison, you get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger. It's really an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your prison walls breached. It's a downward spiral

Rational mind falls in love with its own productions or even more that it tries to elevate its productions to the status of God

What does it mean to have a meaningful life?

What does it mean to have a meaningful life exactly? Maybe it means to take responsibility, because your sacrifices have to be worth something. It has to have some meat what you are aiming at. It has to be something that can elevate your worm-like self to the level of tolerability

Why not lie all the time? Well, there is a bunch of reasons but one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie and there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to except you and so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies then you're going to be in a crisis one day and you're gonna have to make a decision and you're gonna decide wrong and you're going to be in real trouble because you won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgement. Because you filled your imagination and your perception with rubbish

Telling the truth is a good start because then you don't fool yourself about who you are

I would caution any young women not to be deluded into the idea that their career will be of such high quality that it self evidently trumps having a family. You have to have a hell of a career before that's the case

you have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you that seems to oppose your every movement

The proper goal of a Christian roughly speaking is to enact the meta pattern of Christ's life in their own to make it their own story

You are not your own slave. You can't just tell yourself what to do. You have a nature

Bible is actually a story. It's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people edited over thousands of years and then assembled by committee. It's a really strange book but it has a narrative structure and that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years

The highest ideal that a person holds consciously or unconsciously, that's their God

It's a horrible thing to realize that you are a human and what being human means. Christ to Satan, that's the human being

If you start to understand who you are, then you understand the Nazis. I can understand sex criminals. I can understand Nazis. And the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself, truly

Morality comes when you are a monster and you can control it

People can improve themselves I think to a degree that we don't understand. Because a human being for better or worse is something potential as well as something actual

Don't be fixing up the economy eighteen-year-olds, you don't know anything about the economy. It's a massive complex machine beyond anyone's understanding and you mess with it at your peril

If you can't even clean up your own room who the hell are you to give advice to the world

If you want to change the world you start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way.
I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized

The optimists that I hear say - well the pendulum swings and then it swings back - and I think yeah well, sometimes it takes a hundred years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way and sometimes it never swings back at all.
Sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or it burns them, and that's the end of that

The fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth

The truth is something that burns. It burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off often because they're like 95% deadwood

When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that's a horrifying realization and it can easily be 95% of you. Things you say, things you act out ...

Ideal person is the person who tells the truth

In the face of a stressor you are better off psycho physiologically to act voluntarily