From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Today's Quote...
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 09:35:15 GMT


TO THOSE WHO BEMOAN THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

You are undergoing by accident and by your own fault a spiritual journey
which many would consciously purchase at great price, but cannot buy.
Your picture of yourself, your self-illusion, is in process of being
broken. This places you in an unusual position, very close to the truth,
and that proximity is part of your pain.

You describe your grief as a system. Indeed it is, a defensive system of
mutually supporting falsehoods instinctively produced to defend your
old egoistic self-image which you cannot bear to lose, you cannot bear
its death which seems so like your own. Your endless talk of dying is a
substitute for the real needful death, the death of your illusions. Your
"death" is a pretend death, simply the false notion that somehow, without
effort, all your troubles could vanish. This is where you are, and here a
religious believer would pray; you must try to find your own equivalent
of prayer.  The word "will" rarely describes anything perceptible, but an
act of will is needed here, an act of well-intentioned *concentration*.

I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it
truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to
its survival as a successful liar. *Recognise* lies and reject them at
every point. You want to unhappen what has happened, you feel anger
and hate at what prevents this, and which you see as the cause of your
"loss of honour." These old deep "natural" desires appear to you to be
irresistible. Check them, see them to be illusions and lies. Move beyond
them into an open and quiet area which you will find to be an *entirely
new place*.

You say you live in pain. Let it be the pain of the death of the old false
self, and the life-movement of the new real truthful self. We are all
wrapped in silky layers of illusion which we instinctively feel to be
necessary to our existence. Often these illusions are harmless, in the
sense that we can still go on being reasonably good and reasonably
happy. Sometimes, because of a catastrophe, a bereavement or some
total loss of self-esteem, our falsehoods become pernicious, and we are
forced to choose between some painful recognition of truth and an ever
more frenzied manufacturing of lies.

Live at peace with despair. Live quietly with your sense of guilt. Sit
beside it, as it were, and regard the frightful wound to your self-esteem
as the removal of deep illusions which existed before and which this
chance has torn.  If you keep checking any lie and resisting the anger
which deforms the world, you will gradually realise that the poor old
wounded self, with its furious whining and its hatred of itself and
everything else, is not you at all. That self is dying, but another self is
watching it die.

 -- Iris Murdoch, _The Good Apprentice_ (p.70 et seq)

From: Kerry Miller <ASTINGSH%KSUVM.bitnet@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>


##################################################################
Mail contributions to hbar@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
(Contributions only; correspondence to my usual (Cornell) address)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive