For a man who wants-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-things and not feel any stupider than is absolutely necessary: what is lost is superior to anything gained.
Being asleep, confused, confined and stupid is caused by one thing: what you know. (Or, let’s be more verbally accurate, it costs no more). Being asleep and unenlightened is caused by what you THINK you know, but about the non-material world – you know nothing. It is a world totally made up by man’s mind, thus anything you “know” about that world is also made up.
There IS actual knowledge concerning a carburetor, but none concerning politics, literature,
Allah, or “the truth.” All you need to be dazed, distracted, dozing-in-a-dream and stupid, (to be ordinary, in other words), is to think that you or anyone else possesses knowledge of the mentally based, secondary reality in which men live a great part of their lives, and which,
with a straight face-and-ability-to-think – they pretend to take seriously.
If your conscious mind did not take the so-called knowledge, facts and views it finds
unaccountably in its possession, as being the full expression OF itself, you would not feel yourself living in a shadow world, cut off somehow from a direct mental connection with
a more solid version of what the reality of life is.
You know too much – you don’t know anything!
J.