The Self Delusion. Part the introduction

I am going to show you, you are dead. I am going to tell you who you and I really are, and why, at first, we are not going to believe it. We shall see that consciousness is an illusion, once thought self-evidently impossible to see, once thought that an illusion would presuppose consciousness. Or phrased in faux-paradox manner such as 'If conscious experience is not real, what is?' or the endearingly jejune 'I think therefore I am'. I am going to show you what thought is, and how to see it awake. This is, after all, the preferred state in which to read. In brief, we shall understand the illusion is a persistence of envision. We shall unravel what this means later, when we re-ravel our later selves.

Our journey is going to be longer than we thought. We must travel through materialism, sensationalism, idealism, solipsism, empiricism....to ultimate reality itself. But our destination shall not be nothing, for nothing can never exist, and we would not wish to waste our time on a fool's quest, to find nothing.

On our journey we shall encounter love, pain, god, death, resurrection, immortality, despair, and finally, hope. The price of the ticket is free - I have paid for it for you, the value rather more. You may of course, alight at any time.

We shall avoid fruitless sidings. We cannot avoid the nature of space and time, but we shall not be distracted by needless mathematical diversions, such as parallel rails, or the nth digit of pi. We shall not concern ourselves with the length of the rails, only that each piece of track fits together logically. We shall see where logic finally derails. We shall see just how sure a sceptic can be.

But to begin, we must see what words are, since this is how you permit me access to your minds. Let us first make it a more informed consent.

REM:- Pretty up, no allegory, do not say 'thus spoke Bendithustra'. Not even once.