universal situation
73 Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill.
death
3 We hate death for two reasons. It ends life prematurely; and we do not know what lies beyond it.
4* The Bet Situation. From the famous pensée of Pascal. Il faut parier. Cela n’est pas volontaire: vous êtes embarqué. (You must bet. You have no choice: you are in the game.)
27 The more absolute death seems, the more authentic life becomes.
isolation
51 Yet all these lonelinesses are a part of our growing up, of our first going out alone, of our freedom. A child is protected from such fear and loneliness by having a falsely kind and simple mirage erected around him. He grows up and goes out into loneliness and reality and there he builds a more real protection against his isolation out of love and friendship and feeling for his fellow men.
the nemo
8 All of us are failures; we all die.
countersupporting
37 The psychiatric patient is not cured, but made less abnormal, by understanding the contradictions of his own nature. Dimly he begins to see how the forces that use him can be used. To understand is not only to forgive; it is to control.
the ultimate tension
71 The counterpole of all that is existent and known or knowable, that is ‘God’, must be infinite mystery, since only so can a tension remain to keep mankind from collapsing into total knowledge, or a ‘perfect’ world that would be a perfect hell. From this knowledge-mistery tension there is no transporting; and it is the source of human being.
death by numbers
61 As American sociologists havediscovered, an ominous by-product of economic prosperity is that it turns the extra child into a desirableand affordable adjunct of the affluent life. From there it becomes a symbol of affluence, of success in life. The large family has always been encouraged by politicians and priests; the idolatry of those great gods Virility and Fecundity is easily induced. But surely the extra child is, in a world of starving children, the one luxury the already fortunate affluent have no right to offer themselves. For if we claim we are free to breed like rabbits, then evolution will see that we die like them.
nationalism
21 Nationalism is a chip instinct and a dangerous tool. Take away from any country what it owes to other countries; and then be proud of it if you can.
Adam and Eve
91 The male and female are the two most powerful biological principles; and their smooth inter-action in society is one of the chief signs of social health. In this respect our world shows, in spite of the now general political emancipation of women, considerable sickness; and most of this sickness arises from the selfish tyranny of the male.
sexual freedom
104 ... The emotional instability that gets one into bed is unlikly to change into the emitional stability one needs when one has to get out. ...
the synoptic education
148 Funally it will destroy our last childish belief in an afterlife, through which, like a hole in a bucket, real life leaks away. If death is absolute, life is absolute; life is sacred; kindness to other life is essential; today is more than tomorrow; noon conquers night. To do is now, living; death is never able to do.
149 Everything finally is means, nothing is end. All we call immortal is mortal. What a nuclear holocaust may do, time certainly will do. So live now, and teach it.
150 The mystery is not in the beginning or the end, but in the now. There was no begnning; there will be no end.