The Personal

37MetamorphosisOfNarcissus“The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servo mechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.” Understanding Media Marshall Mcluhan

Bertrand Russell also wrote. “A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and piece of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is sooner or latter to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a large and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.”

All ignorance is trapped in the personal, the self, the idiot in a locked system, in denial of the world around them.