~Diary by Chuck Palahniuk ~
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What Misty’s learned is the pain and panic and horror only lasts a minute or two.
What Misty’s learned is she’s bored to death of dying.
You were just trying to scare people back into reality. You just wanted to wake them up from their own personal coma. (P 259)
According to Plato, we live chained inside a dark cave. We’re chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be shadows of something moving outside the cave. They could be shadows of people chained next to us.
Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.
Carl Jung called this shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.
What they don’t teach you in art school. How you’re still always trapped.
How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning (P252-253)
The visionary must live apart from the normal world, and reject pleasure and comfort and conformity in order to connect with the divine. (P186)
People live their lives out of the left half of their brains. Its only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone’s injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration.
A flash of inspiration. A moment of insight.
The French psychologist Pierre Janet called this condition “the lowering of the mental threshold.”
According to the German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom of all people over all time.
According to Plato, we don’t learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.
