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Thank you! I'm glad the point I was trying to make was clear; my mind isn't working very well lately, though I try.


I tried to express similar sentiments in my essay "A Man Hears What He Wants to Hear and Disregards the Rest," [...]

Thanks for linking it—I went and read it, and I'm with you. Maybe that's why I've gravitated to Plotinus' obsessively monistic system: it's hard to consider anyone evil when your model for the world excludes the existence of evil. Perhaps more to the point of my little essay, Plotinus stresses gazing at your angel and nowhere else...


I fear that I have fallen into confused thinking [...]

Oh dear, join the club! Thanks again for holding me up as a touchstone, but like Alice and the Cheshire Cat, I too am mad, or else I wouldn't be here...

[Alice] tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”