E. M. Cioran, Ernest Becker, Denial of Death, fantasy, absurdity, knowledge, and nonsense

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“...life is tolerable only by the degree

of mystification we endow it with.”

E.M. Cioran

Which is to say, knowledge is alien to our incomprehensible beings, and so, by envisioning ourselves through thought's limited lenses, we become aliens to ourselves.

“[‘Knowing’]...is an evasion of the courage to be; it prevents the absorption of maximum meaninglessness into oneself”, stated Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. Becker’s thesis is that the greater part of mankind's woes and sorrows arise from an inability to accept mortality, and so, via various escapes and repressions, he says, we end up living lives of complete fantasy, denial, and absurdity. I would assert, however, that our ills arise not from a denial of death, but ...from a denial of life! For what is life but mystery? So to deny mystery is to deny life.

           Yet we are so brutally corrupted by a relentless assault of unquestioned, deviously articulate, mediocre nonsense, that it is almost impossible to purge the rot which thickly binds us. ‘Truth’, as we learn it, is epistemological suicide.

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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Mystical books, visionary art, and fine art photography by Jack Haas