Time, Color, God and other such lies

Can you see Satan standing outside the window? Can you? No? Damn you! You need to stop listening to lies music feeds your ears. You absolutely need to. You need to understand that time springs to life when the clock stops working. When clock runs, time is dead…so damn dead. Now, that was William Faulkner in Sound and Fury elaborating on clock’s music.

         What do you want to know about time? It’s a lie. A lie that has been tricked upon you and has made you a diabolical giant, with your left hand holding gloom and your right hand holding joy.what do you hold when your hands are holding something? Nothing Sir, absolutely nothing. What a matter of great tragedy it is that your heart holds nothing now. It can only be burdened now-burdened by joy, burdened by gloom, burdened by burdens but only burdened not hold. Come to think of it, the whole heart is a myth, a lie that has passed on for centuries.
       What do you want to know about colors? It’s a lie told to you for centuries that has bestowed you with bags of despair in Van Gogh. Poor soul who lived in hunger for being obsessed with a lie. The color, the lie. The time, the lie. Color, lie, time. 

      Now, both time and color are despicable and crude manifestations of the heart? Now, people say time to be manifestation of mind but I think its heart because when you disconnect heart then you see the irrationality of the perceived time. Till then, there is a veil. What about heart? An organ that deceives you with fluctuating, fleeting emotions? Can you put your belief in an organ as vagabond as that? Even if you do put your belief, what is belief? A fabrication, an illusory concept of heart? If some part of you wants to contradict the aforementioned sentence, and then let me tell you that even the tiny source of your contradiction is based on some belief. A belief that made you think that earth is held by turtles all the way down. Man is the mystified, discombobulated specie among the totality of species. Isn’t that a terrific sense of humor the creator has? Oh, come on! Even your God is a dead, hollow concept. It’s a belief, a lie. I am ridiculing you and me with that outrageous word – Creator. You should be polite and humble and ask the authorities to remove that sacrosanct word from the dictionary.  

        So, now all you want to ask is what is the truth? Well, Nothing….Nothing is the only truth. Rather, nothingness is a better word. When you understand this truth, the lies transform to truth in a beautiful way. In a way, that there is a merger of truth and lies and you can’t distinguish.

        All the religions believe that God created the world and also mankind. But if you are created by someone, you are only a puppet, you don't have your own soul. And if you are created by somebody, he can uncreate you any moment. He neither asked you whether you wanted to be created, nor is he going to ask you: "Do you want to be uncreated?"

        God is the greatest dictator, if you accept the fiction that he created the world and also created mankind. If God is a reality, then man is a slave, a puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even your life. Then there is no question of any enlightenment. Then there is no question of there being any Gautam the Buddha, because there is no freedom at all. Then there is no question of sin or virtue, no question of sinners and saints. A puppet cannot be responsible for its actions. Responsibility belongs to someone who has the freedom to act.

   That is the basic implication of Friedrich Nietzsche's statement: God is dead, therefore man is free.  
         But Nietzsche's statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness. There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness? Remove God – that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom – but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence. 

             Zen is the other side of the coin. Zen does not have any God, that's its beauty. 

            Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane. 

         Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people's interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond – the unknown darkness. Lies can console you, you have to understand it. In fact lies are sweeter than the truth. Gautam Buddha is reported to have said: "Truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end" – when they are exposed. Then comes a tremendous bitterness, that you have been deceived by all your parents, by all your teachers, by all your priests, by all your so-called leaders. You have been continuously deceived. That frustration brings up a great distrust in everybody. "Nobody is worthy of trust...." It creates a vacuum. 

      And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that it was just an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or commit suicide, because nobody can live in a negative darkness. One needs light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished the light and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him. 

       A whole philosophy has grown in the West: Nietzsche is the founder of this very negative approach to life. Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel, and Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger – all the great giants of the first half of the 20th century – were talking only about meaninglessness, anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread, fear, angst. And this philosophy has been called in the West existentialism. 

        I agree with the destruction because what was consoling man was only lies. God, heaven, hell – all were fictions created to console man. It is good they are destroyed, but you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. 

       It is one extreme to believe in God; it is another extreme not to believe in God, and you have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced. Atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant. But your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you, a new intelligence which is not of the mind. That intelligence which is not of the mind makes you aware that the whole existence is tremendously intelligent. It is not only alive, it has sensitivity, it has intelligence. 

     You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. That's what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you.

When you see the rose flowers blossoming, have you ever thought that all this color, all this softness, all this beauty was hidden somewhere in the seed? But the seed alone was not enough to become a rose; it needed the support of existence – the soil, the water, the sun. Then the seed disappeared into the soil and the rosebush started growing. Now it needs air, it needs water, it needs the earth, it needs the sun, it needs the moon. All these together transform the seed which was almost like a dead piece of stone. Suddenly a transformation, a metamorphosis. These roses, these colors, this beauty, this fragrance, cannot come from it unless existence has it already. It all may be hidden; it may be covered in the seed. But anything that happens means it was there already – maybe as a potential.

poems and haiku

1)  Crying about your crying

     You never felt me crying

     In that lonely dark night

     I fought the demons of the light

     Vanishing from my sight

     Cold love, dim light

2) That noisy cafe

    A little time after dusk

    Two lost friends talking

    I look on

    Nostalgia, beauty

3) Dust storm, other side of my window
   Chaos, in the heart
   storm looks at the chaos
   chaos looks at the storm
   Hazy window, Hazy eyes

4)My shadow and I
    A day passes by
    Green trees with birds
    white clouds and the blue sky
    Solitary, I

5)See me nowhere, see me now-here

   The hours pass by, seconds don’t die

   The venom, the eye and I sigh

   A poem goes to dust, song lives by

   Wondering and wondering I cry

   Are you the you? Am I the I?

6) That year of the Satan

    That month of February

    The one with 28 moons

    And a night of full eclipse

    The Year I was born

    When the Fish ate rain, thunder

Man, the foolish

I wake up…pain in the head….throbbing in the temples….eyes tired and refusing to open. It takes 15 minutes and a cup of black coffee….not very hot….and a song “A Day in life” by Beatles to get in terms with the new day of the calendar. Sluggish and sordid….legs jammed and cramped…..a bit of stretching, and I can walk again with manageable restrain binding me. This was the way I woke up for 5 years and dragged myself in life.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am not a moron. I have actually moved so much beyond that word that I can explain you the metaphysics behind a moron and a vibrant being. But, let’s reserve that for another bright day.  With 23 years lived in the room with minimal light, doors closed and absolutely no human contact, I am the bitter feeling you detest in your life. From Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, I am the story of resentment and rejection and in that way, I am also your truth that you casually refuse to look. How many times were you rejected by friends, family and yourself in life? Well, if the count is nil (improbable though) I request you to stop reading and continue with the plebian tasks in which you find your gratification.

I sit in a nearby coffee shop, reading and see all sorts of product of reckless, uneducated and toxic youth around me. They disgust the air I breathe but you see, I am a tolerant being. I tolerate their imbecile attempts to make their body appealing by wearing different mutations of apparels and I tolerate their ridiculous experiments with hair and beard. Now, they walk with a confidence fabricated by their tiny mind’s illusion and now, they have the pseudo composure to walk with a sense of identity and belongingness. A dog on the street is free, they are bonded with their clothes, hairstyles and possessed by the virulent thought of if the opposite gender they are accompanying is absolutely mesmerized by their presence and appearance. Such hollowness, is heavenly, is divine! For both heaven and divine are hollow and dead things. These miniscule rodents disgrace the existence that’s constantly trying to teach them so much.

Now, gentlemen, if you are one of those beings, then you are going to get rattled by what I write. We share something mutual- you laugh at me and I ridicule you. But, you are a crowd and I am a solitary being and by virtue, crowd is foolish. When was the last time you laughed on the idiosyncrasy of a seemingly introverted fellow, who looks to you a little out of sorts? Why did you laugh? Because, he was out of your code, that rigid, blinded code of yours, by which you judge after seeing with your malfunctioning microscopic eye. You don’t even realize in the process that you don’t even identify yourself with your retina.

I wonder if you have become the excretion of man’s anxiety of centuries of coming to terms with his body and mind that constantly adventures in garbage. No, I don’t deny the beauty of man. I deny the singularity…..duality, inconsistency is man’s nature. Beauty and disgrace is carried by him simultaneously. 

But, how will you know? You are busy being played by your hormones. That girl you fascinated about last time, it was nothing but a mischievous hormonal play. You will run away with hands on your mouth if that hormone is poured in a glass to make you smell it. The fascination you branded as beauty but the source of that fascination became a disgust to you. What a comical fool man is!

Your imbecility can be tolerated but what’s disturbing is the arrogance, the narcissism you associate it with.  How to save someone when he denies the existence of Sun and moon? But, then destruction is as constructive as creation. In this despair, anguish you have been put into, try to look for that one moment when existence holds your hand. When it makes you stop and wonder, that everything around is in silence, in harmony…..the trees, birds flying or the white clouds or the fragrance of flowers around you but man is in total chaos with his vehicles and his incessant hurry. No other being is running and postponing life to achieve some purpose other than man. But, man has gone crazy with goals. Not understanding that life was a gift and a gift has no other purpose but joy.  A tree has no purpose. A rose has no goal. A bird is in total joy whereas you are not even present with the tea you drink. Your mind has already travelled some place else while the cup of tea drinks itself in loneliness. There was a time when I ran like all others but then I stopped and what you call my stagnation, I call my evolution. Why to run but not drift like a cloud does with the wind? Why plan and kill one with the planning when the totality of existence has different or may be similar plan and eventually, that’s the path one is going to travel. Mind you,  I am not for inaction but for action that is done without postponing the life that is here-now. I am for the being inconsistent and contradictory. The weather contradicts itself with heat, chill, rain and dryness all the time and yet you hold to the fragmented morals of consistency in thought and action. That's idiotic! 

I wrote to disturb you. You will stop and think when you are disturbed. If you don’t, then don’t be harsh on yourself. It is going to take time, you have stopped thinking with an open mind for a long, long time and inertia will pull you back.

I am the Walrus...

                 I AM the WALRUS!!

 What remains is the darkness….the abyss…between the two tusks of the Walrus. Oh! There is choking and there is immense freedom.  I see my golden breath…my lovely golden breath…I see it...Clearly. It’s so beautiful. I am crying! The Beatles saw it too…..before I saw….and so they cried too. The Walrus…..with eyes carrying layers of Arctic history. Left in the hot ice by Lenon and McCartney and now obsessed to squeeze my golden breath. I am the Walrus…..Cuckooo-Cuckoo!!

There is a sharp trinity between the dark eyes of the walrus……It eats shellfish and wonders where is Paul. What will the Walrus eat….there is so much ice all around! Who will eat the Walrus….no one around…just so much ice.

I am the Walrus….

The Waiting Room....

A waiting room.…….full of passengers. Many passengers in there but there was no form visible. Yes, I vouch for that because I saw it clearly or rather not saw anything in there. No form at all…..absolutely sure about this. Gentlemen, let me introduce myself. I am eyes. I see but not think. I am free from that….that thing you call thinking. Place me in front of a mirror and you shall see nothing but I know I am eyes. I know it because I observe but I do not act.

Actually, I have not told you the truth. I am not eyes. I am actually free from all ‘I-amness’ but have to use ‘I’ to talk to you. You can choose not to hear me but I don’t think you will. It is your choiceless state that will make you hear me. No, I do not speak but in my presence you hear me. Just at this moment, a passenger was summoned and had to walk out of the waiting room. Please pay attention when I say ‘walk’. There is an issue here. I say ‘walk’ because the moment the passenger stepped out of the room, he had a form. So I extrapolate to say that he walked out of the room. You wonder who this passenger is… well, it is YOU.

Remember, the time you were born? Oh, you cannot but I talk about you when you were just born and a moment preceding it, when you were in the waiting room. Try to get this, you are the absurd surrealism that I see and I am the reality you do not. You are the reality that you see but that disables you to see me. So our realities differ because of the relativity of the observer. Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while I happen to be beyond reason and perception. You do not comprehend my manifestation because there is none. But can you overcome the dualism by reducing the existent into manifestations? No….you shall create a new dualism, that of finite and infinite. This new opposition, the "finite and the infinite," or better, "the infinite in the finite," replaces the dualism of being and appearance. What appears in fact is only an aspect of the object, and the object is altogether in that aspect and altogether outside of it.

Gentlemen, I am devoid of an ego and you are possessed and punished by it. I have no ego as I have no form and ego which is like a shadow of the body, therefore cannot exist. You see I didn’t kill it….it never existed. When you kill something, you imply its existence. You try to kill ego and can never do it as it is your shadow that follows you endlessly. I saw you……you renounced to be rid of it and ego manifested through your renunciation. You were trapped…..and the expansion of your ego was the easier path. Your nature is to avoid steep, long paths and so you made countries but ego didn’t leave you. Then cities and then cars and then computers, you tried shrinking but ego expanded. Now, I see you in despair. Well, gentlemen, do not label me a tyrant by arguing that why I didn’t save you……remember? I am eyes and I only see, not react or judge.

Now, you worry….worry about your ends and origins and not understand that you move in never ending circles. Leaving the Waiting Room to get back to the waiting room and then leaving again and you go on doing this. In the waiting room, you are nothing, no ‘I’ in you just like me but outside the waiting room, you exist in I-amness.

I hope you remember me…I am the eyes that have always watched you; whether you were in silence or chaos.

Reflections on J.Krishnamurti (part-2)

When the mind is like a pendulum swinging between surrealism and reality, then we board the wrong metro, drink decaf to keep the eyelids open in the office and wonder about ‘cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, therefore I am’. Now, Rene Descartes was no Salvador Dali, otherwise he would have claimed ‘I am, therefore I think’.

What has to be reversed by reflection is the selfconscious heart, which has to direct itself towards that point where the formative spirit is not yet manifest.

The thought is the manifest, the no-thought is the unmanifest. If your gestalt consists only of thoughts you will not know anything more than the ego. The ego is called “the self-conscious heart.” You remain nothing but a bundle of thoughts. That bundle of thoughts gives you a consciousness of the self, “I am.”

Descartes, the father of modern Western philosophy, says, “I think, therefore I am.” His own meaning is very different because he is not a meditator, but the statement is beautiful; in a totally different context it is beautiful. One can give it a different meaning. Yes, I am – only if I think. If thinking disappears, the I also disappears. “I think, therefore I am” – this I-amness, this self-conscious heart is nothing but a continuum of thoughts. It is not really an entity, it is a false entity, an illusion.

Ego is perhaps the subtlest thing in the world. Like a shadow….we run away from the shadow and the shadow runs with us…..inseperable. But what if we go under the shade of a tree? The shadow disappears…..don’t run and the shadow disappears. This tree is the manifestation of meditation-no mind, no ergo. It is absurd to say that “I think, therefore I am” or “Cogito ergo Sum”……because it implies that if I don’t think then I am not. But that is false…..in my not thinking, in my state of no mind lies my being. It is the state in which no thoughts are floating inside yet we are alert……When thoughts disappear, you are but you don’t feel you are. The I disappears, the amness remains. Those intervals between two thoughts, atomic intervals when we are but cannot say “I am” is the state when being is but ego is not. People renounce all wealth, power privileges to shed ego but then ego appears from the austerity, the so called modesty….from the humbleness.

Our social and religious structure is based on the urge to become something, positively or negatively. Such a process is the very nourishment of the ego through name, family, achievement, through identification of the 'me' and 'mine', which is ever causing conflict and sorrow. We perceive the results of this way of life - strife, confusion, and antagonism - ever spreading, ever engulfing. For what are we striving? What is it that each one is seeking? Until we are aware of our separate pursuits, it is not possible to establish right relationship between us. One might be seeking fulfillment and success, another wealth and power, another fame and popularity; some may wish to accumulate and some to renounce; there might be some who are earnestly seeking to dissolve the ego, while others may wish merely to talk about it. Is it not important for us to find out what it is we are seeking? To extricate ourselves from the confusion and misery in and about us, we must be aware of our instinctive and cultivated desires and tendencies. We think and feel in terms of achievement, of gain and loss, and so there is constant strife; but there is a way of living, a state of being, in which conflict and sorrow have no place. So to make these discussions fruitful it is necessary, is it not, first to understand our own intentions. When we observe what is taking place in our lives and in the world, we perceive that most of us, in subtle or crude ways, are occupied with the expansion of the self. We crave self-expansion now or in the future; for us life is a process of the continuous expansion of the ego through power, wealth, asceticism, or the cultivation of virtue and so on. Not only for the individual but for the group, for the nation, this process signifies fulfilling, becoming, growing, and has ever led to great disasters and miseries. We are ever striving within the framework of the self, however much it may be enlarged and glorified.

Is it possible to be a light to oneself and not depend on a single person? You have to depend on the milkman, on the postman, on the policeman who keeps order at the crossroad. You depend on a surgeon, on a doctor. But inwardly, psychologically, one doesn't have to depend to think clearly for oneself, to observe one's own reactions and responses, if one can be completely a light to oneself. Do you understand what that means - to be a light to oneself? It is not self-confidence, not self-reliance. Self-confidence is part of selfishness. It is part of egotism. But to be a light to oneself requires great freedom, a very clear brain, not a conditioned brain. But to have an active brain, to challenge, to question, to doubt, that means to have energy. But when you depend on others, you lose energy.

Thoughts are the objects and you will have to become aware of them. This is the first awareness: 'awareness one'. Krishnamurti talks about this, he calls it 'choiceless awareness'. Don't choose. Don't judge whatsoever thought is passing by, just watch it, just see that it is moving. If you go on watching, one day, thoughts don't move that fast; their speed has slowed down. Then, some day, gaps start coming: one thought goes and another does not come for a long time. Then, after some time, thoughts simply disappear for hours... and the road is just empty of traffic.

J. Krishnamurti is totally different in his expression, very logical, very rational. The beginning of his work is always with the mind; then slowly slowly he leads you beyond the mind. Intelligence has no choice. That's why Krishnamurti goes on defining intelligence as choiceless awareness. You will have to become more watchful about the thoughts, dreams, memories, flicking by, moving around you. You will have to have more attention focused on the thoughts. His idea is “freedom from thinking not the freedom of thinking”.

Reflections on Jean Paul Sartre & Existentialism

Well, since the book we are reading in our book club these days is The Words by Sartre, I thought to pen down his views on existentialism.
Sartre's Existentialism can be seen as a rigorous attempt to work out the implications of man's individualism.He asks:

What is human freedom? What can the absolute freedom of absolute individuals mean?

What is human flourishing or human happiness? What general ethic or way of life emerges when we take our individuality seriously?

What ought we to do? What ethics or code of action can emerge from a position that takes our individuality seriously.


When you think of it, each of us is alone in the world. Only we feel our pains, our pleasures, our hopes, and our fears immediately, subjectively, from the inside. Other people only see us from the outside, objectively, and, hard as we may try, we can only see them from the outside. No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind. Actually, when you think of it, the only thing we ever perceive immediately and directly is ourselves and the images and experiences in our mind. When we look at another person or object, we don't see it directly as it is; we see it only as it is represented in our own experience.hen you look at the person next to you do you really see them as they are on the inside or feel what they feel? You see only the image of them that is presented to your mind through your senses. This is easily demonstrated by considering how our senses deceive us in optical illusions, but one simple example will have to suffice here.

It seems, then, that we are minds trapped in bodies, only perceiving the images transmitted to us through our bodies and their senses. Each of us is trapped within our own mind, unable to feel anything but our own feelings and experiences. It is as if each of us is trapped in a dark room with no windows.

The Existentialist View--Sartre says that what all existentialists share in common "... is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point." Sartre explains what this means by contrasting it with the opposite slogan: ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE

He says "Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept. He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is ... . Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one having a specific use ... . Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence."

Of course, the artisan in our case is God. Sartre continues: "When we conceive of God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan. ... Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of the paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer... . Thus, the individual man is the realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence."

On this view, the one Sartre is attacking, we get our nature from outside of us, from a being who created us with a preconceived idea of what we were to be and what we were to be good for. Our happiness and our fulfillment consist in our living up to the external standards that God had in mind in creating us. Both our nature and our value come from outside of us.

According to the existentialist, however, EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. Sartre explains:

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself"

Thus, there is no human nature which provides us with an external source of determination and value.

Sartre says:"If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom."

Among the things we find on the mental tv screen, besides objects, other people, emotions, and desires, is ourselves. I see my body, and this thing I see is me. The human condition, for the Existentialist is a tension, a vertiginous imbalance, between the self that watches these images, standing apart from them, and the self that appears as an image. Just as I feel an imbalance upon walking into a department store and finding that one of the people on the video monitor is ME (caught by some unseen camera); or just as we feel a tension looking in the mirror wondering how the person in the glass can be ME if I am standing out here looking at it; so the self feels a tension between identifying itself with mind's eye behind the screen (standing apart from the give and take, the flux and flow, of our experience) and the images of us that appear as part of our experience (engaged in the world)

Thus, we all have the tendency to act in bad faith, to identify ourselves with one of the pictures we find on our mental TV screen, and to see ourselves as determined by one of the outside influences we find pictured there: our nature, our body, the physical world, or the expectations and pictures other people have of us. We are all familiar with the ways in which we try to excuse our actions by pretending that we are simply our bodies and are controlled by the forces that determine them. We have all said things like:



I can't talk to people, I just don't have that kind of personality.

I can't pass this course, I'm just don't have the brain for calculus.

I can't help the fact that I was born a man (or a woman); Certain things come naturally for certain types of people. (Says the man who can't take care of his children, or the woman who can't drive her car.)

I'm no good at this; I guess I just wasn't made to go to college.

I'm sorry I bit your head off yesterday. I must be premenstrual.

I don't know what happened. I guess the beer made me crazy.

In these cases, I am identifying myself with one of the pictures of me I find on my mental TV screen: I am my body, or my brain, or my personality, or my hormones. In each of these cases, I am deceiving myself. I am more than just these, and no matter how I try to avoid it, I am free.

I am not identical with any of the externally determined images on my mental TV screen. I am forever beyond the reach of their determinations within the island of my subjectivity.Even if I were a puppet, my body and its actions completely controlled by some malevolent master, what I am, my mind's eye would still be free and untouched. I could still be free to rebel against my master or make whatever I wished of the situation. They can do what they want to my body, manipulate the objects or pictures of me on my mental TV screen, but they can never touch or control the real me. The self within its island of subjectivity is radically free in virtue of its radical individuality.

Furthermore, I have control over the content of my TV screen as well. External circumstances may determine the objects that appear, how they appear, and when they appear, but I control how these various components will be put together into a coherent picture. Sartre compares the type of freedom we have to that of an artist. An artist cannot control the nature of the canvas, nor of the paints that she has to work with. Nor can she control the nature of the subjects she will paint. But she can control how she will view them, how she will put these various elements together into a unique whole. Likewise, we may not be able to control the various elements within our experience that come from outside us, but we can view them and combine them in any way we like. Our experience is not any one of these; it is the way in which we combine these into a unified whole. We have the power to edit the frames which constitute our experience into the film that is to be our life.

Summing up:

1) Our absolute individuality isolates our real self from the determining influences of the outside world; we can always rebel against its influence; and

(2) Even though the raw material that makes up our experience is determined by outside influences we are free to put these elements together into a unified whole; we must make ourselves anew at each moment, and what we shall make of ourselves is up to us.