The fact that so called sane, normal people enjoy reading detailed case histories of insane, abnormal people should tell you all you need to know.
“About what?”
    Aw --  you know.
 
 
 
 

Reading over the fine print warnings on a prescription bottle/label a man mused: “Everything worthwhile has negative side effects,”
    “Except,” said a thought, “Waking up.”
 
 
 
 

The one absolute fact: if you don’t do something  --  you die;
thus everything man does can be seen as an attempt to cheat  --
especially so are all second reality activities; all art, music, literature, religion, and philosophy are nothing more than efforts to find ways of cheating.
 
 
 
 

Two things are required for interest in any second reality activity:
you must be born with it, and then spend your life continually selling yourself
that it is more important than it is.
“Is there not one exception to this?”
    Yes --  waking up.
 
 
 
 

The first stage is realizing that man wrote all Cinderella stories;
the second stage is realizing that all Cinderella stories wrote themselves.
 
 
 
 

In re: thus, ergo and therefore: everything is a premise --  nothing a conclusion.
 
 
 
 

The key to unlawfully grasping the nature of man’s life
is to distinguish metaphor from symbol;
not lightning from Lancelot, but the voice of god from thought.
 
 
 
 

A man said to a surgeon: “It must be great to go into someone and save their life,”
and the surgeon said to a mystic:
“It must be great to go into yourself and have a life there;”
question: which of the two wears boxers?
 
 
 
 

Another Allegoricized Example From What City Folks Call: Life.
The study of medicine takes twelve years due to the physical complexity of the body, and all there is to learn and memorize about it;
the study of the law takes half as long, for all you learn is to look at
the non physical body of human activity from a certain perspective --  and after that,
the rest of it you make up as you go along.
This most excellently exemplifies the distinction between physical reality,
and man's mentally-based, other reality, and also that between ordinary knowledge, and the understanding of the certain, realized man.
 
 
 
 

A community dedicated to the art of, waking-up decided,
based on his spoken words and writings, that a certain man, not one of them,
was the most awake man alive, and invited him to come address and instruct them.
He came and after being introduced was asked if it would not be good for him to first make perfectly clear to them his definition of, “being-awake”  --
he stood and said: “I do not know what it is,”
and as everyone was struggling to handle this unexpected bomb, he added:
“And that concludes my first lecture.”
 
 
 
 

Everything physically outside you is a reality;
everything non physically inside is you is either a metaphor or a symbol  --
nothing else  --   it can be nothing else;
stub your toe on a rock  –
stub your mind on a metaphor;
cut your hand with a sickle  --
get all sticky handling a symbol that you do not recognize as such.
It is not possible to speak as directly and literally about anything in man’s thought-dependent, other reality (cultural world) as it is about things in the external, physical world for the simple reason that they have no direct, or literal existence --
they exist only by dint of man’s thoughts saying that they do –
that is the complete extent of their existence; therefore, thus & ergo:
they can only be speechified indirectly and non literally through metaphor and symbol (although metaphor has the slight problem of pretending to not only represent something other than  it seems to be speaking of, but also precisely about what it is talking about  --  which is ridiculous,
a fortiori: always go with symbolism over metaphor, and of course,
physical reality over symbolism …...................unless of course you really know what you’re doing).
 
 
 
 

Trying to understand man through studying his literature and culture
is attempting to discover the essence of shadows by watching shadows.
 
 
 
 

Everyone is full of hair balls –
only cats are smart enough to cough them up,
(well, them and men who know what they’re doing.)

The mental herd and man’s other reality are alone responsible for sustaining and supporting themselves  --
which accounts for their continual, shameless, self-congratulatoryism;
a man who awakes to what is going on has no one to thank but himself  --  and thus skips it.