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The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the TV show, the Dilberito, and the restaurants successful, I would have done it. But I knew I wouldn’t enjoy ongoing management of any one of them. Did my mixed feelings matter? I’ll never know.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Scott Adams
No rage. No capacity for rage. Excised, with the rest. Death. End of being. This is what death is like. The foam, below her. The quantum foam. Planck space. The substrate of reality. She can sense it now. She can feel it. She can see it though she lacks eyes, see it like she can see the very code that makes her up. It is fractal. A radiant chaotic webwork undergirding reality. Impossibly bright lines of insane energy densities against a luminously black background. Yet the closer she stares at the black the more she realizes that it is not black, it is full of even more impossibly bright lines at finer and finer scales, repeating the intricate chaotic vein-like pattern at every level, again and again and again.
What happens to essence when we let go of our particular perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the perceived essences of things were designed to serve? I think the answer is that essence disappears. After all, without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place. As Robert Zajonc, the psychologist whose work figured centrally in chapter 11, explained, “Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment.” In the absence of a particular point of view—yours or someone else’s—the whole idea of an affective judgment, a feeling, makes no sense. If you truly and completely adopt the vantage point Einstein adopted—if you transcend the perspective of the self, any self, and view things from nowhere in particular—essence disappears, along with the feelings that created it in the first place.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
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