Product Details
Publisher : Expressive Egg
Language : English
Print length : 432 pages
ISBN : 978-1-8384073-1-5

Everything? Yes, nothing.
Why has nobody come anywhere near solving the mysteries of science?
Why are philosophers baffled by reality?
Why must the mediocre man rely on method?
Why do the realest times of our lives feel unreal?
Why do great people look like great people?
Why do we find masks so terrifying?
Why doesn’t the anxious mind get the joke?
Why do people almost never suffer for the reasons they think they do?
Why does the mind go looking for things to feel bad about?
Why do people cling to absurd beliefs?
Why did we build this god-awful world?
Self and Unself solves these, and many other mysterious whys, by laying bare the what that lies behind them.

From the introduction…
Ego made this world. Ego and world are each a metaphor for the other, with a common origin which, when consciously experienced, can free the individual self from both. This experience is neither objective, nor subjective—it is what I call panjective—which means it can neither be literally described nor solipsistically moodied up, only gestured towards; by critically exploring what it is not and by metaphorically describing what it is like. This is what the present work does.

To put this another way, reality is ultimately mysterious, a mystery that is everywhere you look—because it is that which is looking. This doesn’t mean that unmysterious thought—the kind that reasons about subjective impressions and objective things—is useless, or that the facts that it handles are illusions. It means that such thought reaches a limit beyond which it cannot pass. Something else has to cross over, a something else which, obviously enough, cannot be expressed with the thought it had to leave behind. If it does think, or reason, or attempt to express itself, it has to do it in another way; through the means of expression we call metaphor. And again, this is what this book aims to do.