Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
Thomas LigottiTo my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.
Thomas LigottiNature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one?
Thomas LigottiThe sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (โThe Medusaโ)
Thomas LigottiWhile a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution โ so one theory goes โ this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us โฆ we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see โฆ Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are โ hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones
Thomas Ligotti