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June 30 - August 19, 2021
It had been Fat’s delusion for years that he could help people.
True
What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Indeed
Thank you, Tim Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.
Brilliant
One of God’s greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded.
How could I consume Pynchon but not Dick?
It was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America—1960 to 1970—and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up. The authorities became as psychotic as those they hunted.
Don't do drugs, kids.
women always put on too much makeup when someone dies.
What a gifted writer.
Seagulls croaked by overhead, sailing themselves like frisbees.
So pretty
There wasn’t a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else.
Maybe true
There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.
So good
The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn’t say. In Horselover Fat’s case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late.
Such good stuff.
We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.
Amen
People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
Interesting
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
Huzzah
“exegesis,”
AKA Journal
The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order
...more
God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb, and weak.
GOD IS NO WHERE GOD IS NOW HERE
A theophany consists of a self-disclosure by the divine. It does not consist of something the percipient does; it consists of something the divine—the God or gods, the high power—does. Moses did not create the burning bush. Elijah, on Mount Horeb, did not generate the low, murmuring voice. How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient? If the voice tells him something he does not know and could not know, then perhaps we are dealing with the genuine thing and not the spurious.
Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.
Yeats’s statement, ‘I am an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal’
