Why Try to Escape?
Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free.
We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being. We do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are — though what we would like to be, we cannot say.
Letting Go, Being Free
Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness. Your ordinary mind will give you all you need.
Rather than trying to impose sense upon life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world.
We do not have to wait until we can fly before we can be free. Not looking to ascend into the heavens, we can find freedom in falling to earth.
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom
John Gray
John Gray
born 1948
. Big Think repository
. Forget your delusions and be happy, advises John Gray (Oxford Today article)
John Gray is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray now writes full-time. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
Books John Gray has written include:
- Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
- Seven Types of Atheism
- Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
- The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
- The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom
“A Short Enquiry Into Human Freedom” – John Gray
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On Man, Beliefs and Changes – John Gray
Who Knows Anyhow? 