I just came across a really awesome quote, which I think is from CS Lewis’s “The Problem of Pain”:
- “Pain plants the flag of truth in the fortress of the rebel heart.”
In one of the few mentions of this quote online, I also found a rather similar quote from Marcel Proust:
- “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; it is pain we obey.”
And since I can’t seem to go 10 minutes without quoting Philip K. Dick or gnosticism lately, here is a passage from an amazing essay he wrote in 1978 about the mechanistic universe (the “artifact”), and other crazy shit:
- The maker (of the world-projecting artifact) is here, in the animate debris of this world, his memories erased, so that he has no knowledge of his own identity. He could be any one of us, or a number of us, scattered here and there. The artifact, unaware of him, unaware that it is an artifact, unaware of its purpose, will eventually subject this memoryless maker located here to too much pain; this final excess of pointless, unmerited pain inflicted on the life form that, unknown to the artifact and itself, the maker, will cause anamnesis to occur abruptly; the maker will “come to himself,” recall who and what he is — whereupon he will not merely rebel against the artifact and its pain-filled world; he will signal the presiding deity Shiva to destroy the artifact, and, with it, its projected world.
The artifact does not comprehend what risk it is running in the inflicting of unmerited suffering on living creatures. It imagines them all to be at its mercy and without recourse. In this it is wrong, absolutely wrong. Buried here, mixed in with the bulk, the mass, there exists unsuspected even by itself the Urgrund with all the power and wisdom that implies. The artifact is treading on dangerous ground; it is coming closer and closer to awakening its own maker.
- END -
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